The NASA Voyager Recordings

Music and bands are the dullest conversation topics 99% of the time with that 1% for actual musicians and people engaged in courtship seduction rituals. These conversations tend to quickly veer into the realm of status posturing and one-upmanship.

“Oh yeah, well have you heard of this stoner-core, emo, noise, dark ambient, anti-rock, Bolivian band?”

Blah. Who the fuck needs it?

But that said, I feel the irresistible need to share my latest musical obsession with you all: the NASA Voyager recordings. Five hours of pings, whirls, whoops and whistles mixed with persistent hums and the occasional shrill squawk, much of it stemming from non-audio data such as radio waves trapped in a planet’s atmosphere and particles bouncing off of a magnetosphere. Not to mention plasma and other junk distorted by pressures beyond imaging. The audio is actually just a way to make the data comprehensible, much like the colors on most space photography doesn’t exist unless you start fiddling with the data and making radio waves and the like visible.

Anyway, I recommend this stuff and say give it a listen.

And remember the best thing about ambient music, is that even when you turn it off, you’re still listening to ambient music.