EVERY GENRE PROJECT - December 2 - Space Ambient

Genre of the Day - Space Ambient

Album of the Day - Structures from Silence by Steve Roach (1984)

Year-end best music lists are rapidly pouring out, and the cosmic escapism of SZA’s “Saturn” and the space jazz-ambient epic Endlessness by Nala Sinephro have both received, ahem, universal acclaim in many rankings. Yet another year goes by without a human expedition to Mars—those who once seemed zealous about taking us there are turning their attention to clumsily doge-ifying earthly politics. So we continue to yearn for the galaxy and beyond, with the dream that space can untie us from our physical and emotional gravities and break our patterns as SZA yearned. Music that evokes space has remained popular from this year’s picks all the way back to Gustav Holst’s Planets suite a century ago.

It’s funny, then, that the music humans have sent beyond the sky has not always focused on a universal idea of space that might resonate with alien lifeforms, given our only commonality with them is existence in space—we’ve sent songs from a beautiful variety of classical and folk traditions to reflect the broad range of human music, but only in recent years have extraterrestrial musical transmissions selected tunes with overt astronautical themes. NASA has broadcast the Beatles “Across the Universe” and will.i.am’s “Reach for the Stars,” commissioned for the Mars Curiosity Rover’s landing, and Commander Chris Hadfield recorded a variety of original compositions and a cover of David Bowie's “Space Oddity” during his time on the International Space Station. Next, it seems only right that they broadcast one of the many incredible albums in today’s genre, with the hopes that whatever auditory-processing organs our alien galaxy-mates possess allow them to register the same evocations of space.

Parallel to the course of rocket technology, electronic music capabilities advanced rapidly in the 1960s, allowing interplanetary-sounding sonic expeditions to take flight during the same years Apollo was consistently sending humans to the moon in the early ‘70s. These progressive electronic records by acts like Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze of the Berlin School used the open, endless capacities of synth pads to craft dreamy, sweeping sustained melodies and effectively astral project the listener. Space ambient can be prone to drone, drawing out the feeling of an interplanetary voyage’s length and wonder all at once. Space ambient releases increased in the years after the last human voyage to the moon in 1972, both as a function of ambient music’s coalescence as a form in the late ‘70s and as a post-Space Age hangover: imagine having the pleasure of seeing our fellow man go to the moon again and again just for the lunar fun end without warning. But all that lies beyond our exosphere still loomed large into the ‘80s and stimulated space ambient opuses with continued human missions to space, probe launches, and Reagan’s laser visions.

Ambient maestro Steve Roach wisely knew that to musically tackle space, one had to start with a keen understanding of earthly nature. Growing up in the desert, he would often sit and listen to the wind rushing over electrical wires and the frequencies these interactions with nature emitted. His 1984 Structures from Space draws from those ingrained observational influences with a transcendent extraterrestrial vision. “Reflections in Suspension” sets twinkling glimmers, vivid and organic in their timbres, amidst pads that rise, fall away, and refract; the piece’s gradually unfolding harmonics carry positive overtones, inspiring the radical hope of one’s smallness when suspended without gravity amidst hulking astronomical bodies. “Quiet Friend” is imbued more with the unease and vulnerability of our infinitesimal nature in the ever-expanding universe of unknown provenance—steady synths hum under those shaken by vibrato, striking a contrast as elemental as that of physical and gaseous matter. The sonic weight and oscillating intensity of the title track feels like putting your hands on your helmet and nearly taking it off to become one with space, but deciding against it in light of the danger—observing from behind glass will do. Though most of us will not get a stay at a space station, this album brings us imaginatively to the final frontier in its quantum serenity.