Bleep

Throughout the history of musical composition, the heavens have sparked imaginations like nothing else. Where laments and songs of love sing the parsing of human emotion both everyday and uncommon, Holst’s The Planets and Richard Strauss’ works from Also Sprach Zarathustra convalesce musical shapes to understand the impossibly distant and unknowable environs of space, frequently in wonderment, often dwarfed in humanity’s insignificance. Science fiction populated the mutability of other worlds with extraterrestrial horrors and utopias, but advancements in electronic sound dared to see ourselves among them. Once mankind accomplished the unthinkable and reached the moon in 1969, it’s as if earth’s artists witnessed the event and found it wanting. Where were all the moon men?

Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, recorded and performed by Brian Eno together with his brother Roger and Daniel Lanois as a soundtrack to the 1983 feature-length documentary For All Mankind, understands that space travel is an extension of humanity, and not a break from it. Expanding on the ambient approach formerly codified by Brian Eno with 1975’s Discreet Music, the celestial textures of Apollo invoke a futurist pastoralism; great swathes of blissful ambience unfolding over delicately strummed guitars, flitting from graceful candour to trepidatious pause. Well before ambient music became a ubiquity on streaming platforms, the two Enos and Lanois were using it to invoke humanity’s future and, in essence, predicted it. Remastered and rereleased here to coincide with the Apollo mission’s 50th anniversary, this expanded edition includes 11 new compositions by the original trio, working together for the first time since the work’s release.