“Stellardrone” is the moniker of Lithuanian composer Edgaras Žakevičius, who produces ambient space music in a “Berlin School” style. This kind of electronic music is typified by artists such as Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Manuel Gottsching. The genre's identification with space music distinguishes it from the more percussive and rhythm-oriented Düsseldorf School groups such as Kraftwerk. Amazingly, despite his popularity, Edgaras has no formal musical education.

This album successfully captures the atmosphere, mood and vastness of space. The tracks have euphoric synth pads, undulating twittering synths, atmospheric rumbling drone sounds and sparse but effective drum beats such as those on the title track “Light Years” and “Comet Halley” which has an eighties “Vangelis” sound to it.

The standout track is “Eternity” which gets a welcome reprise towards the end of the album. Here melodic synth pads are joined by atmospheric excerpts from Carl Sagan’s famous “Pale Blue Dot” speech which tells the story of the photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, from a distance of 3.7 billion miles. Earth as a tiny dot illustrates how small and unimportant we really are in the vastness of the universe.

Apart from Carl Sagan’s voice mentioned above, there are no other vocals, samples or anything else to distract from this album’s relaxing Ambient soundscapes. This can make a lot of the tracks sound similar, however, it also makes the album good background music for long car journeys or perhaps a space-themed soundtrack. In fact Steam offers a "Stellardrone - Light Years Album Music Pack" for the sci-fi strategy game “Stellaris”(Paradox Development Studios) so you can listen to it whilst playing the game.

This is computer-generated “direct-to-disk” music and is only available as a digital download. Many fans of the Stellardrone albums are calling for physical vinyl releases. We will have to keep a look out!