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Michael Giacchino, one of Hollywood’s most celebrated and prolific composers, certainly has enough material for a greatest hits album. He’s created the brilliant scores to “The Incredibles,” “Up,” “Lost” and 2009’s “Star Trek”. An album with cues from these titles (and others that he’d composed), would do gangbusters. But he didn’t want to do just another greatest hits album.

Instead, he thought about his uncle Pete, who lived outside of Philadelphia. Uncle Pete, you see, owned an appliance store.

“He also sold stereos, and at the stereos were those big console stereos which we love. And RCA would send him tons of these demo records for the customers, so they can understand how great it sounds. Inevitably, we would go visit the store on weekends, and he would always give us albums to take home,” Giacchino explained. Soon enough, they had a giant collection of records,...

Composer Michael Giacchino has finally managed to realize a long-held dream: his first solo album, released Friday, which combines science-fiction storytelling with lounge music and an overall theme that is unexpectedly relevant to our times.

It’s called simply “Travelogue, Volume 1,” and is credited to “Michael Giacchino and his Nouvelle Modernica Orchestra.” Mondo is releasing it on vinyl as well as to streaming platforms and digital retailers.

The Oscar and Emmy winner has been working nonstop for years on films in the “Star Trek,” “Jurassic World,” “Planet of the Apes,” “Incredibles” and Marvel Universe franchises. So when the pandemic hit, he decided to write something just for himself.

“I love old radio dramas,” he tells Variety. “I love the music of Arthur Lyman, Martin Denny and Les Baxter. And I loved Captain Kirk’s ship logs from the original ‘Star Trek.’ I took those and just mashed them all together into a concept album.

Since getting his start in composing over three decades ago, Michael Giacchino has covered a lot of ground: video games, working with J.J. Abrams on “Lost” and “Star Trek,” scoring Pixar films like “Coco” and “Up” (for which he won an Oscar), and most recently on the upcoming “The Batman.” So when the pandemic struck earlier this year, he was suddenly presented with the rare gift of time, but no shortage of the creative energy that’s made his work such a key part of recent cinema.

On Monday, the composer released the first track from his first-ever non-soundtrack album “Travelogue: Volume 1″ by Michael Giacchino & his Nouvelle Modernica Orchestra. The culmination of socially distanced recording during the pandemic, the 11-track concept album takes inspiration from some of Giacchino’s favorite entertainment. To tell his original story, Giacchino worked with writer-director Alison-Eve Hammersley, who wrote the narrative.

The music — blending synths,...