These pieces, except for one, were created on Christmas Eve, several years ago – perhaps 2007, though I cannot be sure. I worked for the entire night constructing them, though my process was not additive but subtractive, or rather divisive: they became less under my control the more I tinkered, as I introduced new variables, spliced segments at random, and subjected them to modulations I did not understand. I have tried to add to this collection, but nothing I do fits with the basic algebra of these particular songs.
I hadn’t slept the night before, and I knew I would have to be awake the next morning to celebrate the holiday with my family. I supposed that insomnia is common to astronauts, for whom day and night are terrestrial abstractions. I felt at one with Apollo 8 that night, in that manic intensity that froths in the tail end of an insomniac binge…
I had first heard the Apollo 8 broadcasts a few days or weeks before that, and was struck by the tone of awed sincerity that overwhelmingly negated my cynical, straight-faced response to what I would like to have seen as saccharine piety. I was born at a time when “the space age” was already a nostalgic slogan, a boilerplate alarum for a dead futurity: the obvious fodder for MTV’s earliest advertisements. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw6xesXLIAA). How could what seemed like the greatest accomplishment in human history become, in twelve short years, comical prefatory footage for a Buggles video? And how perverse am I, now, to count that broadcast as coequal to the moon landing, being born after both?
I thought there was something sublime there, something that gave an urgency the electronic pieces I was creating otherwise lacked. I was inspired by Eno’s Apollo, of course, and the discerning listener will wonder if many of the harmonies come from an earlier piece of his. The theme of space travel, however hackneyed, lent an anchor by which to tether music which would otherwise float up and pop like sad balloons. They remain suspect of an ersatz vitality. But they are still the only tracks I’ve produced that have any vitality at all.
I encourage any listeners to use the best headphones they have access to. The originals do not scale down very well, in any case, and I’m afraid much of their granularity is lost entirely on ordinary speakers; laptop speakers produce nothing but irritating static.
