Space Music: The Vinyl Frontier

by Clifton Bertram

I own a vintage Technics SL-1300 direct-drive turntable -- one of the rare ones with an all-metal chassis -- and I'm constantly scouring vintage record shops and the local Goodwill for the best deals on vinyl. Quite often, I can find incredible albums for as low as $1.00, which makes it more than worthwhile to keep this heavy, ancient beast around.

One classic platter I've owned for over 25 years is the Blade Runner soundtrack by Vangelis. To this day whenever I drop the microgroove stylus onto that record, the music's ambient hum and soaring, pulsating electronic soundscapes immediately transport me to the grimy streets of Los Angeles in 2012.

To me, the Blade Runner soundtrack is the single most paradigmatic example of a genre of music often referred to as 'space music'.

There are dozens of definitions of 'space music' out there, and some purists are literally ready to come to blows over the minor distinctions between space music and ambient, or space music and space jazz. For the purposes of this article, I'll use the broad but useful interpretation provided by
Backroads Music in a July/August 2004 article by Lloyd Barde, Making Sense of the Last 20 Years in New Music:

"Space Music" now defines and describes an entire sub-genre, as a listening experience that evokes the feeling of space -- inner space (floating sensations, opening doorways to internal experiences, stimulating the imagination); or outer space (drifting through weightlessness, passing galaxies, hearing imaginary sounds of space).

Surprisingly for a genre that evokes technical and modernistic responses as effectively as it does, the blueprint for space music was drawn up as long ago as 1877 when Elisha Gray (an inventor whose patent for the telephone was preceded by Alexander Graham Bell's by only one hour), investigating ways to make telegraphic communications more efficient, discovered a method for transmitting music along electrical wires, and built a device he called an Electroharmonium, or electro-acoustic piano.

By the beginning of the 20th century, a general dissatisfaction with status quo across the entire spectrum of the arts world was beginning to manifest. The dynamics that were to culminate in the revolutionary 1913 Armoury Show were already beginning to emerge, as were the roots of new and outrageous movements such as Futurism. The very earliest of the Futurists, presaging even Filippo Tommasso Marinetti, the man who created their manifesto, was a prophetic and prodigal composer named Ferrucio Busoni. In 1907, Busoni wrote Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music , saying:

We must break out of this narrow circle of pure musical sounds, and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds...by selecting, coordinating and controlling noises, we shall enrich mankind with a new and unsuspecting source of pleasure".

Thirteen years after Busoni's pronouncement, a device was created that enabled the Futurists' manifestos to become sonic reality. A professional musician, who also happened to be the Diretor of the Technical Laboratory (Vibration Research) at the Physics and Technical Institute of the University of St Petersburg, demonstrated a remarkable device to his colleagues at a conference:

...a small box with two antennae, one on the right and one on the left. Could it be a new type of telegraph? Or an electronic measuring device? [the musician] moved to the front of the machine and began working it. There were no handles or keyboard. He waved his hands above the instrument like an orchestra conductor and seemed to obtain sounds as if by enchantment

.

The man was named Lev Sergeivitch Termen, and the device he demonstrated became known as the Theremin after a gallicized version of his name. Today, many authorities consider the Theremin to be the first electronic instrument.



In 1929, Bell Labs' Homer Dudley developed the vocoder, or voice encoder in an attempt to code speech for transmission. Dudley's device eventually become synonymous with techno and electronic music, providing mechanistic vocals in songs like 'The Raven' by The Alan Parsons Project and
even more recently, 'Sensual Seduction' by Snoop Dogg, but it also provided the theoretical basis for the later development of the synthesizer. We'll come back to the synthesizer in a minute.

By 1948, the first real electronic music was being created initially at two influential sites. In Paris, at RTF Studios, Pierre Schaeffer was developing some radical techniques, and equally groundbreaking work was being done in Germany:

[Schaeffer]...worked with recordings of pre-existing sound which he manipulated and modified in playback, constructing pieces out of chains of noises. The use of natural, or concrete, sound sources caused this style to be named musique concrète. Schaeffer's first compositions, the Etudes, were realized in 1948; with others, including Pierre Henri, he developed a detailed syntax for the genre in the 1950s. At the same time, at the WDR studio in Cologne, Werner Meyer Eppler and Herbert Eimert were developing Elektronische Musik, using test equipment - oscillators as sound sources, modified by filters and modulators - rather than pre-recorded sound.

Within the next decade, the first occurrence of what can be called 'space music' by today's definition, was born when the soundtrack for the 1956 sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet was created:

Louis and Bebe Baron created the soundtrack for the "Forbidden Planet" movie by constructing little cybernetic brains, each one making their own noise. They spliced it all together to create what is still today a thoroughly enjoyable soundtrack.

Technical wizardry was soon to beome less critical, however. Those who wanted to spent more time playing their instruments and less time with a soldering iron were about to take a giant leap into the future.

Inspired by time spent building Theremin kits, inventor Robert Moog designed and built the first real musical synthesizers in 1964, in collaboration with composers Herbert Deutsch and Walter Carlos. Carlos' album 'Switched-on Bach', released in 1968, became a monster hit and the first classical album to go platinum, and it generated intense interest in the world of pop music, immediately finding its way into the repertoire of the leading bands of the day, including the Beach Boys, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and influencing such seminal albums as 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hears Club Band'.

By the early 1970s, Germany's Elektronische Musik movement had evolved in what is called the Berlin School, or more colloquially, krautrock, with bands like Can, Kraftwerk, Popul Vuh,Tangerine Dream, and Ash Ra Tempel leading the way.

By the mid-seventies, synthesizers were so commonplace as to be attainable by even tyro garage bands, and electronic music had become widely internalized in the pop music scene through its wide usage in both the glam rock (for example, David Bowie) and progressive rock (King Crimson, Alan Parsons Project) genres. That broad famiiarity, coupled with the evolution of computer memory, combined to ensure that the 1980s would see a renaissance of electronica. In particular, bands like Devo, Thomas Dolby, Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark, Shriekback, and the early Human League, among others, all demonstrated a particularly intense form of technophilia that would soon become one of the hallmarks of space music.

It was also at around this time that the term 'New Age Music' was coined by radio stations and marketers to describe a variety of non-mainstream music, often incorporating animal and nature sounds, world music instruments, electronic instruments. The 'relaxation' aim of much New Age combined with the swooning strings of some of the electronic music of the day and with cosmically themed imagery to coalesce into what we consider today to be space music.

By the 1990s, something of a nostalgia craze --tinged with just a hint of irony -- began when hordes of young and hipper-than-thou music fans -- who by then had become a generation for whom there was no "time before electronica" -- began to search back into the early days of the genre for nuggets of new music. Numerous revivals occurred, one of the most notable of which was the popularity experienced by Juan Garcia Esquivel, a relatively unheralded pioneer who suddenly found himself the darling of the anthologists.

...in 1993, Esquivel enjoyed a tremendous revival in the last decade of his life. Indeed, it could be argued that he was more famous after he was "rediscovered" than when he was at the height of his creativity. Several CD compilations from his RCA material were released, followed by the reissue of most of his RCA albums on now out-of-print BarNone label CDs. Then in 1996, tracks from one side of an RCA Christmas LP (the other side coming from Ray Martin) were packaged, along with Esquivel's spoken intro and farewell and new recordings of his arrangements by Combustible Edison on Merry Xmas from a Space Age Bachelor Pad.

Today, the lines between space music, techno, trance, drone, ambient, electronica and a galaxy of other splintered sub-genres are relatively tangled. There have been numerous attempts to define boundaries for each of them, but as so often takes place in the art world -- and particularly in the music world -- each attempt to create a boundary results in that boundary being smashed until today you are just as likely to find Portishead performing rockabilly tunes and a CGI Johnny Cash collaborating with the Chemical Brothers.

Perhaps thankfully, though, these endless mutations on the space music theme are not likely to find their way into my local Salvation Army, so they're not likely to find their way onto my SL-1300, either.