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Carl Sagan, "A Glorious Dawn"
The beauty of this record is in how it makes the idea of space travel not only catchy but entertaining. I hope a lot of kids get a chance to hear it or watch it on youtube, because the lyrics, a collage of utterances made by Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and other scientists, as run through an autotuner and placed atop a moving beat and driving melody are truly inspiring. This is popular science at its best.
The summer wouldn't quite feel proper without weekly episodes of Do or DIY, the radio show hosted by Vicki Bennett of People Like Us on WFMU. Her voice, song selections, and mixes are now as much a part of the season as are morning mimosas on the Fourth of July, marinated mushrooms on my beat up grill, and smog alerts. The music Vicki plays on her show helps me keep a wistful attitude in an atmosphere of sizzling humidity and hot tempers. As the mistress of all things avant-retard, she also does a fine job in turning me on to all manner of captivating, kitschy, and corny songs.
Hence this 7" record. "Glorious Dawn" and the other songs, available as music videos for free watching and listening on symphonyofscience.com, became a steady, relentlessly addictive soundtrack for me a few weeks ago. When I saw that a 45 of one of the songs was available I had to have it. It is nice to have a physical artifact from the project, as opposed to it being purely online. The etching on the back makes it awesome: it is a reproduction of the diagram on the Golden Record placed in the Voyager spacecraft, the audio contents of which were selected by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan. In doing all this John Boswell, who is the man behind the project, has created a wonderful homage to his hero, even more so by naming the record after him.
As for the music: it shares little in common with the recent explorations of space music that I wrote about in my review of the Gultskra Artikler album Galaktika. It eschews the sometimes marginalizing approach more experimentally inclined musicians take in a favor of a populist path. Major chords, a buzzing bass line, and a sprinkling of piano and keyboard round out what is mostly a drum driven song. While there is plenty going on, none of it takes away or distracts from the lyrics which are the obvious focal point of "Glorious Dawn." When phrases like "how lucky we are to live in this time / the first moment in human history when we are in fact visiting other worlds" join in concert with the music I get excited about the many prospects science opens up for humanity. As far as I'm concerned, any music that gets people enthusiastic about science and exploration is a good thing.
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