We had a day out at Jodrell Bank yesterday, home of the Lovell telescope which has been sending radiowaves into space since 1957 playing a huge part in our understanding of space. The dish is enormous, once the largest in the world, still the third largest. It moves too so it can be pointed in any direction. We saw it move while we were there, rotating round the track it sits on, which was actually really exciting.
A new visitor centre has been built since we were last there and is full of brain frying information about the universe, galaxies, pulsars, black holes, quasars and dark matter. It's a humbling place to visit and spend a few hours at, the vastness of space and what's out there compared to the smallness of us and what's down here. There are several artistic responses too which neatly connect science and art, space and poetry. Frighteningly the UK Research and Innovation agency have decided to cut Jodrell Bank's funding from April 2028 and without this the facility- pioneering scientifically, grade 1 listed and a UNESCO world heritage site- may close down.
I had two major takeaways from the masses of information we read. The first was that when we see light coming from space, the stars for example, we're actually looking back in time- the light is coming from hundreds/ thousands/ millions of years ago and is only reaching us now so what we are seeing has already happened. Jodrell Bank identified the Crab Pulsar, a supernova explosion seen and recorded in China in the year 1054, recorded at the time as a 'guest star' that was bright enough to be seen for several days during daylight. The second was that when we tune between TV or radio channels about 1% of the noise we hear that the antennae pick up is actually 'the fading glow of the Big Bang'.
The phrase 'the fading glow of the Big Bang' stuck with me for some time. On the way back some of what I'd been reading about and seeing at Jodrell Bank made connections with music and songs and this hastily thrown together mix is a response to that. Musically it's all over the place in the first half but then settles into a dance music groove.
Forty Minutes Of Music Inspired By Jodrell Bank
- Beth Orton: Galaxy Of Emptiness
- Ride: Pulsar
- Timothy J. Fairplay: Dreams Of Andromeda
- Mr Fingers: Qwazars
- Kolsch and Gregor Schwellenbach: Cassiopeia
- Sub Sub: Space Face
Jodrell Bank and the Lovell telescope have conducted research into galaxies and clusters, including gravitational lensing studies of galaxies (the bending of light from a distant source as it travels past a massive object such as a galaxy or galaxy cluster, apparently).
Beth Orton's Galaxy Of Emptiness is from her album Trailer Park in 1996, a track mixed and produced by Andrew Weatherall and Keith Tenniswood in their studio under the flight path at Hounslow. Sonically it's incredible, all space, detail, Weatherallian FX and Ali Friend's double bass ricocheting down the line. Lyrically, it's vast and tiny, cosmic existentialism. Loss.
A pulsar is a pulsating star, a highly magnetised rotating star that is emitting beams of radiation out of its magnetic poles. Galactic lighthouses.
Ride's Pulsar was the lead song on their Tomorrow's Shore EP, released in 2018. I'm not sure the post re- union Ride have recorded a more exciting song than Pulsar. It is in their own words, 'a space anthem' about light, existence and trying to get home.
The Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest major spiral galaxy to our own, the Milky Way, located about 2.5 million light years away and sometimes visible to the naked eye.
Timothy J. Fairplay's Free Andromeda album came out on Hoga Nord in 2022, a very fine nine track selection of synth electronics and drum machines. Worth revisiting if you haven't spun it for a while.
A quasar is an extremely bright and distant, active galactic nucleus, powered by a super massive black hole. I'm typing this but I'm not sure I fully understand it. But I like the idea that there are things that are much bigger than us that we can only stare at in wonder.
Mr Fingers came back with Cerebral Hemispheres in 2018, cosmic acid/ dance music. Qwazars was a stand out, a rotating synth pattern and chord change that is utterly hypnotic.
Cassiopeia is a constellation in the northern sky. It's five brightest stars form a W in the sky, visible to the naked eye. A section of the Milky way runs through it containing a number of young luminous galactic disc stars and nebulae.
Kolsch's Cassiopeia came out in 2014 with piano and strings by Gregor Schwellenbach. Minimal, emotive 2010s house music.
The Lovell Telescope appeared on the sleeve of Sub Sub's Space Face, a 1991 record that blew up in clubs at the time not least The Hacienda, thundering breakbeats and Balearic pianos with an aptly chosen sample, 'My god, it's full of stars' (taken from a 1984 film called 2010- The year We Make Contact). Sub Sub were local boys, from Wilmslow, just down the road from Jodrell Bank. As I'm sure you know, a few years later after a fire that destroyed their studio/ rehearsal space on Blossom Street in Ancoats they became Doves. In 2011 they played an acoustic gig at Jodrell Bank in front of the Lovell telescope. Here they are playing a Bagging Area favourite,
Kingdom Of Rust.