What’s up kids? I’ve got a doozy for you all today: a 1.7-hour playlist of songs about space. Why? Just for kicks, and because it gives me an excuse to post this link:
www.spacetelescope.org/images/archive/top100/
Which, if the URL doesn’t make it obvious, is a collection of the 100 “best” space telescope pictures, and, I gotta say, there’s some great ones, for sure.
But anyways, about the music! 18 songs from a wide variety of genres and time periods, all with titles and/or subject matter relating to space. The ILS powers that be tell me I can’t actually post it in the playlist section quite yet, although hopefully that will the the final destination, but for now you’ll just have to deal with non-continuous playback, first world problems and all that. I figure most of you would rather just listen than read a bunch of words, so I’ll throw the music up right here, and then at the bottom I’ll stick some descriptions of the tracks in case you’re curious about ‘em. It is meant to be listened to in order, I think I got the flow down pretty well, considering the disparate sounds from any one track to another, but I figure not every song will click with everyone, so I promise I won’t be offended if you skip around! And now, without further ado, Space:
Man or Astroman?: Journey to the Stars
Culture: Black Starliner Must Come
Alien Project: The Alien Meeting
Parliament: Mothership Connection (Star Child)
Grateful Dead: Dark Star (1974/06/23)
Pink Floyd: Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun
The Flaming Lips: Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon (Utopia Planitia)
Cannonball Adderley & John Coltrane: Stars Fell on Alabama
Billy Bragg & Wilco: California Stars
Phish: Halfway To The Moon (2011/09/04)
So yeah, that’s the lot of that, here’s a few words about the various tracks:
Stargate Avalon: Mainly a transitional track on Celtic Cross’s album Hicksville, it makes a nice little soundscape intro to the playlist. Generally Celtic Cross is electronica mixed with Celtic folk music, much in the way a lot of psy-trance appropriates Indian music.
Journey To The Stars: Man or Astroman? combines sound samples from old science fiction movies with straight up driving surf rock. This particular track comes from their almost self-titled album Is It… Man or Astroman?
Dark Star: Off of Beck’s The Information (of design your own cover with stickers fame), this track is particularly Beck-like, very much in the slacker alternative-electro-hip hop deal Beck has been pushing on, well, most of his albums. This song bears no resemblance to the Dead song of the same name…
Space Walk: Off of Lemon Jelly’s downtempo classic Lost Horizons, a nice laid back song with piano and guitar loops over vocal samples of, if you can believe it, a space walk.
Stardust: Art Tatum doing his thing on piano as only he can. Off of the second disc of The Complete Pablo Solo Masterpieces.
Black Starliner Must Come: Great song from one of the great Reggae albums of all time, Culture’s Two Sevens Clash.
Interstellar Hiss: From psy-dub group Dub Trees’ East Of The River Ganges, this is about what you’d expect from a psy-dub son called “Interstellar Hiss”.
The Alien Meeting: Considerably harder electronica than Interstellar Hiss, off of Alien Project’s Midnight Sun.
Mothership Connection (Star Child): Parliament gettin’ their funk on. All there is to it. Off the album of the same name.
Dark Star: The legendary Grateful Dead jam vehicle this time. Their most consistently explored song, Dark Star is one of those quintessentially Dead songs that describe themselves in the lyrics. Often coming deep in the second set of uptempo, rock friendly shows, Dark Star shows up just like, well, a dark star, looming huge over the set, drawing in all the energy that came before it and crushing it into unfiltered psychedelia, only to eventually emerge, usually into a Bob Weir cowboy tune. This particular version from Jai-Alai Fronton, in Miami, has an unincluded transition into a Spanish Jam.
Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun: A live version of the early Floyd psychedelic workout, off of the first half of Ummagumma.
Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon (Utopia Planitia): In many ways a spiritual descendent of Pink Floyd, the Flaming Lips, in my opinion, have never quite captured the feeling of soaring over alien skies quite like they do on this, the last track from the marvelous Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots.
Stars Fall On Alabama: Two of the greatest saxophone players to ever grace the Earth, jazz at its finest.
Planet Caravan: A mellow, spaced out cut from Sabbath’s Paranoid, “Planet Caravan” shows that Sabbath wasn’t quite a one trick pony.
California Stars: Billy Bragg and Wilco got together to put music to a handful of Woody Guthrie lyrics, resulting in the Mermaid Avenue albums, of which I think there are two? Nice little wind down alt-country/folky song.
Space Oddity: You’ve probably heard this song. David Bowie singing about a spaceman.
Halfway To The Moon: One of Phish’s newest songs, composed by keyboardist Page McConnell. This particular version comes from their summer tour closing stand in Denver, a spectacular cap on the band’s best tour yet since they ended their second hiatus back in ’09.
Fireball XL-5: Closing the playlist off with a nice little ditty, the theme song for the marionette space t.v. show Fireball XL-5, which I encountered on the double disc vinyl album of TV Show Theme Songs From The ’50s and ’60s.
