exploration | The Innerspace Connection

To The Moon and Apollo 11

Last night I had the absolute honor of watching the new Apollo 11 moon mission movie composed of newly discovered footage from National archives along with previously existing footage. The content was expertly compiled into a riveting and breathtaking feature film, 100% authentic and free from Hollywood bombast and special effects. It was absolutely stunning.

And all throughout the film, I couldn’t help but grin like a child each time I heard voice samples from Mission Control, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Nixon’s legendary phone call to the astronauts all instantly recognizable from the countless downtempo/electronic/ambient techno albums which borrowed heavily from these classic archival recordings.

Among them, I recognized samples from:

Coldcut’s “Outer Planetary Mix” remix of “The Guitar” by They Might Be Giants
The Orb – (much of the Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld LP)
Public Service Broadcasting – The Race for Space LP (featuring Sputnik 1, the Apollo 1 fire, and the Vostok 1, Voskhod 2, Vostok 6, Apollo 8, Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 missions)
and Lemon Jelly’s beautiful “Spacewalk” from their classic Lost Horizons LP.

If I’ve missed any other classics, please let me know!

In celebration of the incredible spirit and inspiration of the new film, I’m spinning Time Life’s NASA: To The Moon 6LP archival vinyl box set issued in 1969.

If you haven’t seen the film yet – I highly recommend it!

And for more NASA vinyl beauty, don’t miss this entry for the 40th Anniversary Voyager Golden Record Box Set!

NASA - To the Moon (Time Life Records)

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on March 24, 2019 at 9:08 pm Comments (1)
Tags: 1969, 6lp, adventures beyond the ultraworld, apollo 11, archival, box set, buzz aldrin, coldcut, exploration, landing, Lemon Jelly, LP, michael kapp, mission, moon, nasa, neil armstrong, nixon, outer planetary mix, Public Service Broadcasting, race for space, Space, spacewalk, the guitar, The Orb, They Might Be Giants, to the moon, Vinyl

The Challenge: Best Strategies for Navigating the Waters of a Large Media Library

In recent weeks I’ve found my listening habits growing stagnant as my artist and label discographies are slowly exhausted. The challenge for users with large media libraries is the task of finding yet-unexplored territories and developing strategies to facilitate the charting of those new waters.

One of the caveats of my otherwise-stellar media server software is that there is no way to browse by genre. I realized this evening that queuing a chronology of albums from a given genre would be a wonderful way to explore new sounds within my library so I went to work straight away and by nightfall the project was a success.

A few initial discoveries – classics of soul jazz

Using the genre text cloud feature in gmusicbrowser I constructed .m3u playlists of several intriguing but unfamiliar genres within my collection. Each list contained 10,000 to 17,000 of the tracks best-representative of the genre based upon RYM data and discographic libraries from the genre’s most prominent artists and composers.

I ended up splitting the Jazz list into two subsets – early jazz recordings from 1924-1958 and modern jazz recordings from 1959-1979. This will help make the listening experience more uniform and will be an easier load on my mobile devices when spooling the lists.

With the task completed, I’m now ready to queue up thousands of hours of quality content from an array of genres I’d only explored superficially when I first acquired the recordings. I’m looking forward to new discoveries and to the wonderful soundtrack it will provide for my days at the office!

The first batch of playlists are as follows: