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.