Pale Blue Dot

Pale Blue Dot is an eighteen-minute suite for two guitars after the astronomer, writer and science advocate Carl Sagan. It is dedicated to Matthew McAllister, and has become one of Cochran & McAllister’s most requested works.

The five movements, You Are Here, Voyager, Sacred Black, Routine Interplanetary Violence and Aberrations of Light, take their cue from Sagan’s reflections on the photograph of Earth taken by Voyager 1 from the edge of the solar system.

Cochran & McAllister premiered the suite at the Austin Peay State University Guitar Festival in March 2024 and recorded it as the title work of their debut album on Sacred Black Records. They have since performed it in the United States, Scotland, Austria and Iceland, including in a multimedia show with projected images of space.