Fifty Minutes Of Music Inspired By Apollo 11

A couple of nights ago I watched Apollo 11, a 2019 film about the events of July 1969, fifty five years ago this summer, when astronauts Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were fired into space on a Saturn V rocket and Armstrong and Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon. The film is a documentary using only archive footage from NASA (including previously unseen 70 mm film) without narration- the only audio comes from the films themselves, voices from ground control and the three men, sound from the mission and ending with a speech by Kennedy at the start of the 1960s. This is a ten minute preview. 

There were several pieces of dialogue between the people in ground control and the three men in a tin can hundreds of thousands of miles away in space that are instantly recognisable, partly because they've been sampled on records. I thought it might be a good theme for a Sunday mix, a collection of tracks inspired by the Apollo missions, some with samples from ground control and the three astronauts, some from other film versions and some just from the wider topic of lunar exploration. It came together quite quickly. It's no surprise probably that The Orb feature.  

Fifty Minutes Of Music Inspired By Apollo 11

• Brian Eno: Always Returning
• Brian Eno: An Ending (Ascent)
• Tranquility Bass: They Came In Peace
• Sedibus: Toi 1338b
• Ian Brown: My Star
• Meatraffle: Meatraffle On The Moon
• Meatraffle: Meatraffle On The Moon (Andrew Weatherall remix)
• The Orb: Supernova At The End Of The Universe (Earth Orbit Three)

Brian Eno's music for the 1983 album Apollo: Atmospheres And Soundtracks is rightly a legendary piece of ambient music, the soundtrack to a film called For All Mankind, an Al Reinhart documentary about the Apollo missions which didn't see the light of day until 1989. Eno, his brother Roger and Daniel Lanois created an album of heavenly, stargazing sounds, synths, piano and pedal steel. Always returning and An Ending (Ascent) bookend the film's soundtrack- both a gorgeous.  

They Came In Peace is a 1991 single by Tranquility Bass, an American duo of Michael Kandel (who I've just noticed I share a birthday with, and who sadly died in 2015) and Tom Chasteen. It's one of 1991's best 12" singles, opening with crickets and the gentle hiss of percussion. The vocal sample, 'they came in peace, for all mankind', is Neil Armstrong on the moon, reading from the plaque left on the moon that reads in full, 'Here men from the planet earth first set foot upon the moon July 1969, AD. We came in peace for all mankind'. The bass loop is one that I could happily listen to for hours, crickets chirruping away around it. Andrew Weatherall later sampled the bass loop for his Squire Black Dove remix of One Dove's Breakdown. Fun fact; I was given Andrew's copy of this 12" last year by Sherman at AW60, blue vinyl with a sticker on the plain black sleeve noting the BPMs of the four tracks in Andrew's handwriting. 

Sedibus is the recent project of Alex Paterson and Andy Falconer, an Orb offshoot (Andy was a collaborator back on the early Orb albums). Space exploration, the cosmos and the moon programmes are all over The Orb and Sedibus. This year's second Sedibus album is about the search for extra- terrestrial life, SETI. The first album, The Heavens, came out in 2021 and this track has a vocal sample intoning the word Sputnik, the USSR's satellite that preceded the US moon programme. Toi 1338b is a planet int eh Pictor constellation, discovered in 2019 by a seventeen year old student on an internship at Goddard Space Flight Centre. Toi 1338b is eleven times the size of earth 1301 light years away from us.

My Star was Ian Brown's return to music after the breakup of The Stone Roses and for me remains his best solo single. NASA samples are an integral part of the song, along with a throbbing bassline and twinkling guitar line and Ian's lyrics about space exploration, nuclear stations, military missions and astronauts being the new conquistadors. The vocal sample 'You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we're breathing again, thank the lord', is in Apollo 11, ground control shitting bricks as the command module re- enters earth's atmosphere and drops into the ocean. My Star came out in January 1998 ahead of the album Unfinished Monkey Business.

Meatraffle's Meatraffle On The Moon came out in 2019, a fantastic dub- inflected song imagining un- unionised workers stuck in dead end jobs on the moon, with the weekly meatraffle and karaoke sessions in the lunar base social area their only joy. 'They are so sick of this they just wanna be by the sea', they sing and sound utterly defeated by it. The song is on Meatraffle's second album, the highly recommended Bastard Music. Andrew Weatherall's remix is a nine minute bass- led dub monster that spins the poor moon workers woes out into the cosmos. 

The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld is an ambient house touchstone, their 1991 debut album and tour de force. NASA samples appear all over it, not least in the back to back twenty five minutes of tracks Supernova At The End Of The Universe (Earth Orbit Three) and Back Side Of The Moon (Lunar Orbit Four). I picked the former, which has samples of Saturn V blasting off, various flight control to lunar module communications, and one from Dr Strangelove Or How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Bomb. 

Half An Hour Of Eno

Some Brian Eno for Sunday, mainly focussing on his ambient and/ or soundtrack music but with a more meaty cut from his 1981 collaboration with David Byrne thrown in for good measure, the perfect relaxed start to a Sunday in May. There could easily be another three of four follow ups to this mix without even scratching the surface of Eno.

Half An Hour Of Brian Eno

• Lizard Point
• Dover Beach
• The Pearl (with Harold Budd and Daniel Lanois)
• Always Returning
• An Ending (Ascent)
• Mea Culpa (with David Byrne from My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts)
• Theme From Top Boy
• Deep Blue Day

Ascent

I took this picture in Manchester walking down Oldham Street back in August. A month from today it will be Boxing Day and the whole Christmas thing will be done and dusted bar the leftovers. The longest day will have passed and we'll be heading towards the new year. 

As Tony Wilson/ Steve Coogan says in 24 Hour Party People, “It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,' says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good time pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away.” (thanks to Guarin Tees for reminding me of this quote recently on social media). A lot of people are going through a lot at the moment and it's tough sometimes to keep going and remember that all this will pass. Which it will, sooner or later. 

Today's music comes from Brian Eno, no stranger to literature and clever quotes himself. Here he was with long term collaborators his brother Roger and Daniel Lanois and the soundtrack to the 1989 documentary For All Mankind. It's as good a way to start Friday morning as any. 

An Ending (Ascent)

Prophecy

Back in 1984 David Lynch attempted to film Frank Herbert's novel Dune, an epic science fiction story set on a distant planet which is entirely desert where the most valuable substance in the universe is a consciousness expanding spice. Among the cast were a young Kyle McLachlan, Virginia Madsen, Patrick Stewart and Max von Sydow. It was also one of Sting's big adventures in acting and if that weren't enough came with a soundtrack by Toto. It bombed, critically and commercially. One of the reviews said that 'several of the characters in Dune are psychic, which puts them in the unique position of being able to understand what goes on in the movie'. I haven't seen it for many years but I think it was a film which only really made any sense if you had read the novel and for those that hadn't it left them with a lot of work to do. It's been remade by Denis Villeneuve, is in cinemas now and has been much reviewed much more positively than the 1984 by both critics and fans. I haven't seen it yet but would like to. 

The 1984 film's soundtrack was almost entirely by Toto except for one piece of music from Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. In some ways sci fi soundtracks are the perfect place for Eno's ambient synth music. 

Prophecy Theme

If you want more, there's a full length, twelve minute version of Prophecy Theme on Youtube. Amusingly, when you type Dune 1984 into Google below the first search returns in the People Also Ask box, the first suggestion is 'is Dune the worst movie ever?' Lynch was disappointed with the final cut, having been instructed to cut the three hour running time down to a more manageable two and a quarter hours. He ran out of money for the FX too and ended up with something he wasn't' happy with but which had his name on it and disowned it. Three different versions have been screened at different times or in different places. Eno's Prophecy Theme at least is something that survives whatever version or cut is being shown.  

Blue And Green

Yesterday felt like the first day out of the winter, maybe not spring but a step towards it- sun shining, blue skies, wispy clouds, first shoots of flowers appearing. 

Brian Eno's work has always been very linked to colours, from his album with his brother Roger last year (Mixing Colours) all the way back to the 70s. Deep Blue Day is beautiful piece of work, recorded for his 1983 Apollo: Atmospheres And Soundtracks album and re- used in 1996 in Trainspotting in the scene where Renton dives into The Worst Toilet In Scotland in search of a suppository. Deep Blue Day (recorded with Roger Eno and Daniel Lanois) is gorgeous, an gently ecstatic drift of synths and pedal steel guitar.

Deep Blue Day

That gives me the excuse, if one were needed, to post this re-edit by Mojo Filter of Eno's 1975 classic Another Green World, Eno's semi- ambient, piano led original pushed into Balearic waters with a drumbeat and a truckload of samples, including a child saying 'L- O- V- E, Love'. Play one, then the other- Sunday morning sorted. 

Another Green World (The Blue Realm)

Harold Budd

Harold Budd has died aged 84,  of complications arising from Covid. He was a master of ambient music, a composer, pianist and guitarist who played an enormous role in developing what ambient music sounded like in the 1970s and 80s, often with Brian Eno (their joint albums Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror and The Pearl are incredible works, Harold's soft, atmospheric piano playing at the centre of the sound. If ambient music has a centre). Eno, Budd and Daniel Lanois made The Pearl in 1984, a highlight in the back catalogue of all three men, an album reprising the piano textures and treated electronics of Plateaux along with nature recordings. He worked with Cocteau Twins and then later with Robin Guthrie-  their 2007 Before The Day Breaks album is a beautiful blend of treated guitars, FX and piano pieces. Ambient music, by definition, is supposed to be background music. Budd's works carry emotional weight that make it much more than wallpaper to chill out to. 

The Pearl

The Eagle Has Landed