Why the Sci-Fi Concept Album Keeps Coming Back, on Solivagant by Skiffska and Its Astronaut, Emma

A Ukrainian Composer’s Instrumental Album About Home, Memory and a Mission Across Space

Solivagant is a rare English word for someone who wanders alone, and Skiffska has built a whole album around it. The Ukrainian composer released the ten-track instrumental record on 2 September 2026. It is a spacious electronic story about an astronaut named Emma, who carries the memory of a lost world through space.

Skiffska has Ethereal Dream, the track Solivagant began with, in the playlist below, and every piece on the composer is listed on the Skiffska artist profile. Solivagant came to this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Hear it first, then read on for Emma’s mission.

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That is why the science-fiction concept album never really goes away. A story told in sound can carry what is hard to say outright, and this one carries more than most.

Skiffska is the project of a composer and producer from Kyiv, Ukraine, and she calls Solivagant the final chapter of her ambient era. Space has been personal to her since childhood. Her grandfather worked in space development in the Soviet Union, and she grew up around models of spacecraft and photographs of cosmonauts.

Her catalogue reaches back to 2021, with a first album, The Healing Season, in 2022 and My Mindfulness in 2025. Alongside it she keeps a separate catalogue of production music, offered only for licensing.

Emma’s Mission on Solivagant, the Skiffska Album About Saving a Lost World’s Memory

So the story comes first. Emma is an astronaut whose mission is to carry the Archive to safety, a store of everything left of humanity: its stories, art, science and discoveries. Then the ship’s systems start to fail. The Archive might vanish a second time, and Emma faces an impossible choice.

Behind the science fiction is something much closer to home. She wrote Cassiopeia while her parents were still living in frontline Kramatorsk, and the worry in it changed the direction of the whole project. From that point, she knew the story had to be finished.

She came to see the album as a story about a mission rather than an escape. She kept thinking of people displaced from frontline cities who share old photographs and videos of their lives before the war. In their own way they do what Emma does, saving the memory of a time when they were happy.

The plot was harder than the music. Every time she tried to make it fully logical, pieces of it came apart. In the end she accepted that the uncertainty belonged in the story, because the people who inspired Emma live with it too.

Space, Loss and Memory, From Jean-Michel Jarre’s Rendez-Vous to Emma’s Archive

Space and loss have met on record before. Jean-Michel Jarre planned the last track of Rendez-Vous, in 1986, around a saxophone part that the astronaut Ron McNair was to record aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. After the shuttle broke apart 73 seconds after lift-off, Jarre dedicated the track to McNair and the crew. Solivagant takes that idea of music as a keeper of memory and makes memory itself the cargo.

From One Handpan Track to Ten, the Order and the People That Shaped Solivagant by Skiffska

The album began with a sound. Ethereal Dream came first, built around the handpan, and it came out as a single in December 2024. Zero Gravity followed in January 2025, and with it she first heard a story in the music. Where the first track felt calm and suspended, Zero Gravity carried hope.

Cassiopeia, Pulsars and Dead Planet were out by April 2025, so half the album was public 17 months before the whole of it. The tracks, she says, almost found their own order. They run from a two-minute Intro to Evershadow, with the title track split in two at the centre and Aurora Station and Dead Planet after it. The whole record lasts about half an hour.

Skiffska, credited as Alina Moiseyenko, composed, arranged, mixed and mastered it and made the cover art. Roman Gatylo advised on the sound and heard the album early. It is also on Apple Music.

An AI-Assisted Film Gives Emma a Face, and Vangelis Shows Why Missions Need Music

It also comes with an AI-assisted film, a way to realise the sci-fi world without the budget of a traditional production. Liliia Boiko developed the story with her, designed Emma and the visuals, and produced the videos for Solivagant I, Aurora Station and Cassiopeia. Dmytro Boiko made the sound effects for the Solivagant I video.

Music has been tied to real missions as well. Vangelis released Mythodea in October 2001, timed to the day NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft entered orbit around Mars. Emma’s mission is fiction, but the idea of a record travelling alongside a journey is the same.

From the ElectroPop.News curator team: “A space album that starts from a handpan, a steel instrument played with bare hands, keeps its feet on the ground. The furthest-flung story on the record rests on its most human sound.”

Her next chapter is already under way, carrying the mood of her earlier work into a different sound, and she says it will not sound like Solivagant. A Legal Sound Drugs club remix of her single Running arrived in October.

For now, Solivagant is the one to hear, in order, from Intro to Evershadow. A record named for someone who wanders alone turns out to carry a great deal of company.

Follow Skiffska on Spotify, Apple Music, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, and find the album’s story and film at Solivagant.

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