Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of voices ….
Like “we journey from ignorance to knowledge. Growth reflects the advancement of the species. The exploration of the cosmos is a voyage of self-discovery.”
I heard it on Cosmosis' “Self-Discovery” on Fumbling For The Funky Frequency (2009).
It was Carl Sagan, lifted from the TV Series Cosmos.
Other voices I’ve been getting are right out of the history of science fiction cinema and, further out... from astronauts participating in NASA's Apollo Space Programme.
They are the (male) voices that together speak the tongue of cosmic trance – which is the heart of the Goa trance phenomenon - and remnant within psytrance. They are the voices of a psychedelic astrofuturism, in which Space Age mediations have been intercepted by sonic and visionary artists repurposing popular culture in the pursuit of progressive evolutionism.
But don't let me get too far ahead of myself...
In Space Age popular music forms, from cosmic rock to cosmic jazz, funk and ambient, outer-space is the place that exiles of varying backgrounds have fictitiously habituated in order to resolve crises in the human condition, to achieve self-transcendence, space becoming a theatre of possibility, a stage for the performance of alien-nation, a theme that I’ve explored in a chapter for Tobias van Veen’s forthcoming collection Afrofuturism: Interstellar Transmissions from Remix Culture (Wayne State University Press, 2010).
But that's part of the broader story. Here I want to make a few statements about how extra-terrestrial space became a source of gnostic transcendence within Goa trance. Reproduced in samples from cinematic science fiction and from NASA dialogue, in psychedelic trance, spaceflight is a narrative device, perhaps what Kodwo Eshun would call “conceptechnics”, for inner travail, the avatar’s quest, the hero’s journey.
The “space” for this journey is external and internal, extraterrestrial and psychosomatic. A cosmic threshold. Within the psychedelic space programme the realms of the physical and the imaginal interface such that space becomes the terrain across which one physically, or within which one psychically, travels. And the farther from routine consciousness (and one’s home) one ranges, the more other one might become from one’s self. While travel in exotic locales might potentiate self-transcendence, there is no farther to sojourn from one’s ontological routine than the space beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. As it transpires, the exosphere was first subject to human exploration and conquest in the period that LSD (and other techniques of self-expansion, astral traveling and other out-of-body experiences like meditation, yoga, and isolation tanks) achieved popularity. From the early psychedelic period, the LSD “trip” gave users the impression of floating in space, a disembodied sensibility imagined with the assistance of astronauts and cosmonauts operating in weightless conditions care of the earliest NASA and Soviet missions into orbit transmitted into homes via television. If, as Victor Turner had argued, marginal spatial conditions are essentially liminal conditions, with the advent of the Space Age humans were accessing the most physically marginal (and thus liminal) space to date.
Outer-space, then, if we were to continue in Turner’s idiom, would be a “realm of pure possibility”. While the desire for expatriation from the ravages of modernity saw freaks make exodus to Goa, India, in the 1960s and 1970s, and thereby extend the then well-exhausted western frontier into the East, they did so at a time when manned missions beyond the Kármán line offered a new frontier of research and experimentalism, later revisited, remixed and repurposed by the scriptwriters of Goa trance.
This explains why, in Goa trance, journeys in space are deeply imbued with Eastern mysticism, Hindu iconography, yogic practice, and the possibility of merging with the divine. The galactic Orientation was apparent, for instance, in the work of Jörg Kessler, label manager at Shiva Space Technology, whose compilation The Digital Dance of Shiva (1999) features on its cover art a cyborg-alien Shiva dancing across what appears to be a star gate, or The Overlords, whose cover design for All the Naked People (1994) featured three sadhus and an astronaut.
While overt Hindu symbolism (i.e. the Om symbol) might have lost popularity by the late-1990s as the scene receded from Goa, producers and psychonauts were remaining true to their roots. Thus the Oming sequences on prodigious Israeli outfit Astral Projection’s space-operatic “Cosmic Ascension” (on Dancing Galaxy, 1997) left little doubt that the launch sequence for their full-powered mission was initiated on the subcontinent. When Gilbert Thévenet, producing as Asia 2001, projected a violet skinned hairless and earless alien with large almond eyes and vestigial lower face gracefully seated in lotus position with its bulbous head at the centre of a mandala on the cover of Psykadelia (1997):
Or when the cover of Astrological’s Space Odyssey (1998) featured a Buddha statue with a fleet of flying discs appearing in a red sky enlivened by an electrical storm, we had arrived at the juncture of two critical paths of self-discovery: the cosmic and yogic odysseys.
Within cosmic trance, the desire for expatriation is transmuted into the fixation with launch into the zero-gravity of space, the “final frontier” (a phrase also applied to the mind). We can locate the launch sequence on the "Live at Trancentral" version of what is sometimes claimed to be the first Goa trance release, the KLF’s “What Time Is Love?” (1990): “Okay here, we’re gonna give you a countdown... 4, 3, 2, 1, Fire!” On their seminal “Zero”, Astral Projection (The Astral Files, 1996) marked that moment of release where the crew of Apollo 8—whose 21st December 1968 mission was the first manned space voyage to escape the Earth’s gravitational field—have completed their check-lists, initiated launch sequence and, under the power of a Saturn V rocket, cleared the tower. At maximum thrust “Houston” reads the voyagers “loud and clear”. In the 1995 release, “Hypersphere” (Hypnorhythm) French outfit Transwave were anticipating launch phase with the repeated announcement from the film Dune: “31 seconds and we’re going for auto-sequence start”. Here countdown sequences narrativize quantized rhythms intended, with the assistance of carefully measured micrograms of psychoactive compound, to effect consciousness alteration: lift off. The result was immeasurable: “Boy, it’s just beautiful up here looking out the window – it’s just really fantastic” (Apollo 16 Commander John W. Young, from KLF's “What Time is Love? (Live at Trancentral)”.
“Imagine yourself in infinite space floating.” This call to disembodiment made by Space Tribe on “All You Need Is Spirit And Nothing” (The Ultraviolet Catastrophe, 1997), evokes the euphoric sensation produced from meditation, isolation tanks and psychedelics. The flotation bath had been entered several years earlier: “I felt like I was flying …. I was flying, very slowly flying, high in the sky.” The line is repeated onboard The Infinity Project’s cosmic “Uforica” (on Stimuli / Uforica, 1994). Emerging in 1989, the formative Goa act (with Ron Rothfield, aka Raja Ram, and Graham Woods) felt compelled to orchestrate a sense of meditative weightlessness through space tropes. Their earlier acid techno-trance journey “Zero Gravity” (Tribadelic Meltdown EP, 1992) features an astronaut reporting on the sensation of “perfect zero gravity”, stating “you can feel it shake, there’s a real strong vibration”.
The Infinity Project's most common source, however, was Star Trek, probably the single most sampled media-source in psytrance. “Time and Space” from the white label Time and Space EP (1993) reproduced Captain Kirk repeating “I was floating in time and space”. Lifting a line from Star Trek X: Nemesis, “Well, it seems as though we are truly sailing into the unknown”, among psytrance’s most enduring acts, Electric Universe (“Acidance”, Cosmic Experience, 2004), steers the ship into the infinite and beyond.
The Infinity Project’s Time and Space EP also possessed the untitled track (“B2”) featuring space-avatar Dave Bowman’s eureka moment from Arthur C. Clarke’s epic novel and unedited versions of Stanley Kubrick’s concurrent 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey: “My god, it’s full of stars!” Featuring one of the most powerfully gnostic narratives in cinema, 2001 is among the most sampled films in psytrance.
The space odyssey preoccupied many of the early Goa producers. Hallucinogen's (aka Simon Posford) notable “Alpha Centauri” (on his first twelve-inch alongside the momentous “LSD”, 1994) was a voyage to that constellation. Laughing Buddha (Jeremy Van Kemen and Bill Halsey) embarked on an ethereal quest for “Andromeda” (on their first 12-inch Infinite Depths, 1995). Prana were thrust into “Primal Orbit” (Primal Orbit EP, 1996). And Juno Reactor, the ongoing collaborative project formed in 1993 by Ben Watkins, references the third and final part of 2001: “Jupiter: Beyond the Infinite” on the 1995 album Beyond the Infinite.
Within all of recorded human history, space has been a source of awe, its depths occulting mysteries of origin and destination, genesis and apocalypse, with the mid-20th Century penetration of space providing an allegory for percipience, the journey into the mind. Ever since Timothy Leary gave weight to the off-planetary odyssey as the path towards the “universe of pure energy” - his space conquest-dependent consciousness evolution constituting a strange mutation of astrofuturist salvationism promoted by visionaries like Clarke and Robert R. Heinlein - a cosmic consciousness has endured among the space-cadets and astro-boys drawn to Goa trance. For these psychedelic warriors, NASA’s Apollo lunar program held appeal in storying the journey. But while NASA was developing science and harnessing technology with the purpose of launching humankind beyond the exosphere, visionary artists were repurposing audio technologies to enable exploration of inner space.
A Space Odyssey
Found on the first Goa-Head compilation (1996), the whisper repeated on Power Source’s classic “Granada”, “take me to the moon”, is not an uncommon refrain. The first full album release from Juno Reactor, Transmissions (1993), was a momentous realisation of this desire. With the Apollo lunar program stamped all over the album, you can imagine early VJs synchronising images of moonwalking astronauts to “Luna-tic”, a track receiving eerie transmissions from Apollo 17 astronauts struggling an improvised duet while bouncing across the lunar surface on the final Apollo mission in 1972. The track is cut with dialogue between Earth based NASA support crew member, Anthony England, and Apollo 16 Commander John W. Young, on the lunar surface:
England: Hello Orion, this is Houston.
Young: Hi there. We lost you for a while.
England: Yeah, we sure did.
It’s a curious choice of exchange, but one which I feel implies that there can be no discovery of one’s self, without its eclipse. The dissolution of rational consciousness and of base-ego associated with trance is analogised in the space mission, where “mission control” (“Houston”) signifies rationality, the consciousness from which explorers seek distance and with which they may experience patchy communications while in “orbit”. Such flights from, and obscure transmissions with, consciousness are enhanced by effects amplifying the risks involved for the traveler. Some fifteen years later, this became superabundant on Nanospheric (2008), the work of independent German producer Lars Goossens (aka Cybernetika).
On the opening “Plasmoid”, below a deep pounding space atmospherics a garbled dialogue is reproduced from the infamous 1970 Apollo 13 mission, which was crippled by an explosion damaging the command module Odyssey, resulting in a loss of oxygen and electrical power.
Command Module pilot John L. “Jack” Swigert: “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”
Houston: “This is Houston. Say again please.”
Commander James A. Lovell: “Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a main B bus undervolt.”
Houston: “Roger. Main B undervolt.”
Lunar Module pilot Fred W. Haise: “That jolt must have rocked the sensor on - see now - oxygen quantity 2. It was oscillating down around 20 to 60 percent. Now it’s full-scale high.”
Lovell: “Okay. And we’re looking at our service module RCS helium 1. We have, B is barber poled and D is barber poled, helium 2”
At this point “Plasmoid” orchestrates unmistakable awe. Adrenaline rushes as pressure is lost, a sense of hurtling out into the vacuum arising in simultaneity with the realisation of the potential for permanent disconnection from base. But competency holds up, amid barber-poled and inscrutably technical dialogue.
Hasie: “Okay, Houston, are you still reading Apollo 13?”
Houston: “That’s affirmative, we’re reading you. We’re trying to come up with some good ideas here for you.”
Houston: “13, Houston. We’d like you to verify a couple of readings for us. We’d like the nitrogen pressure on fuel cell 1, we need the oxygen pressure on fuel cell 2.”
Haise: “Okay. Nitrogen on 1 and oxygen on 2—is that correct?”
Houston: “Negative. Oxygen on 3.”
Haise: “Okay. (pause) Okay. Systems test 1-A says zip, and 2 baker which is 3 oxygen says point 6.”
Houston: “2 baker says point 6 and say again the other one.”
Haise: “Fuel cell 1 nitrogen reads zero.”
Houston: “Roger, zero.”
Cybernetika’s curtain raiser sets a course towards peril. Oxygen levels are low, breathing is abnormal, and in the remainder of the album one plunges into a chorus of spectral noise. In an exhilarating tale of danger and ingenuity followed closely by TV audiences world-wide, guided by ground flight operators the crew on board the Odyssey would use their lunar module as a “lifeboat” before re-entering the command module to swing back to Earth via the moon’s gravity. On the last track, the psybreaks inflected “Finale”, the Apollo 13 performance dialogue resumes:
Johnson Space Center: “Coming up now on three minutes until time of drogue deployment. Standing-by for any reports of acquisition. (pause) We got a report that ARIA 4 aircraft has acquisition of signal.”
Houston: “Odyssey, Houston. Standing by. Over.”Captain Swigert: “Okay, Joe.”Houston: “Okay. We read you, Jack.”
Houston: “Odyssey, Houston. We show you on the mains. It really looks great!”
Johnson: [Applause] “Extremely loud applause here in Mission Control.”
It’s a rejoiceful return to Earth, to consciousness—splashed down, resurfaced, forever changed. The depths of space teem with mystery and possibility, the human exploration of its vastness analogous to the drift into the unconscious associated with dreaming, a universal source of visions brought back to benefit the world of traveler-visionaries. But “the catch” cannot be obtained without having first risking one’s life, confronting life-threatening uncertainties, the danger implicit to the Odyssean narrative and the perils risked by Argonauts transferred to the space odyssey. Francis Goodwin’s 1638 utopian lunar story Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither offered the tale of an astronaut named Domingo Gonsales who negotiated devils and wicked spirits en route to the Moon. In the Space Age, the “devils” or “ghosts” were in the machine, the risks technical. That the perilous circumstance of the Apollo 13 mission finds appeal among EDM practitioners is possibly because they too know the risks of technical hitches, the possibility of a ruptured journey ever present in machine malfunction, crashed hard-drives, mixing errors—the competency with sophisticated hardware manipulated towards the functional outcome lending favorable comparison with the aeronautical engineer in command of the mission.
It’s easy to see why the adventures of spaceflight, instilled with boys-own tales of adversity and invention, would become so popular among a male-dominated DJ culture. The Apollo 13 incident and recovery evokes the heroic adventure stories built into spaceflight narratives popularised, for instance, in Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo (1947). Moreover, the narrative sequentialises Joseph Campbell’s monumythical “hero’s journey”, which was built largely from masculine narratives. In The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949), Campbell articulated the panhuman mythical narrative: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (30). There are several stages to this common mythic structure where the hero is called upon a quest, encounters a strange world, faces trials and overcomes challenges, often with assistance, and is awarded a gift as a result of experience gained. The “boon” may be used upon return from the journey to improve conditions in the world. The basic narrative involves—in the fashion earlier recognised by Van Gennep in Rites de Passage—phases of departure (or separation), initiation, and return, a narrative later put into the service of the psychedelic heroics entheonaut Terence McKenna deemed necessary to the survival of our species. Here, the challenge of goal-oriented spaceflight (i.e. NASA’s lunar missions) offers raw material for the monumyth. Twenty years following the publication of Campbell’s book, a Space Age version of the myth was performed on an international stage. And in a further 20-25 years, it was resurrected by Goa trance artists.
The entire mythical structure had been envisioned in the early 1960s when, in a Special Message to the US Congress, on May 25th 1961, President John F. Kennedy stated: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth”. The message was sampled by Digital Sun on “Men on the Moon” (The Spiral Of Power, 1997), amplifying the inimitable desire of artists to adopt the goals and achievements of NASA’s lunar programme to narrativize the hero’s journey.
In the wake of the self-spirituality movement post-1960s, the digital electronic revolution post-1980s, space conquest is typically repurposed to the goal of visionary transportation. In psytrance, we find the visionary zeitgeist translated into sites of reception where dance-habitués are enabled to interpret their non-ordinary states via narrative devices conflating the vacuum of space with the unconscious. Inside the cosmic vibe of the over-night trance floor, participants are cast upon a sea of audio disturbances and entropic noise, confront anomalous chemical reactions and diabolical event horizons. If travel through such space, the “voyage thither”, presents an odyssean challenge, its overcoming potentiates a successful transit, where the re-aggregation (to the morning, the Earth) potentiates interstellar rebirth, celestial satori, the re-evaluation of the self. Here, the successful negotiation of adversity is the mark of achievement, as consciousness breaks through the radio silence. Thus while “Hyperion” by Silicon Sound (Synthetic Chronicles, 2008) possesses many unanswered radio requests from Houston, the ultimate return is reassuring: “Buzz, this is Houston. Radio check. All systems are go, over” (from Phaxe’s “Secret Effects”, French Plaisir, 2008). For re-evaluations to take effect, what goes up must come down. And so divinity commands, as it does on Astral Projection’s “One”, that “you will return safely to Earth”. [But with what gnostic manna?]
Tranquility Base
The 1969 Apollo 11 mission is the most visited resource in this story telling. As the lunar module descends towards the Moon, pilot Buzz Aldrin announces via AFGIN’s cosmic Goan “Apollo 11 (The Eagle Has Landed)” on Art From The Heart (2009): “we are now in the approach phase, everything looking good, altitude 4200 feet”. Before it dumps its arpeggiated payload, in the decent to the lunar surface “Destination Milky Way” by Opium of the Masses (The Lost Planet, 2007) also offers the guiding voice of Aldrin: “13 forward … Coming down nicely. 200 feet, four and a half down… five and a half down… 60 seconds….” Crossfading back to AFGIN’s "Apollo 11" now, only a matter of feet from the surface and evoking feet shuffling on an outdoor dance floor.: “three feet down, 2 ½, kicking up some dust, 3 feet two 2 1/2 down, faint shadow, four forward, drifting to the right a little. OK”. The interfacing of deep space and deep mind appears to motivate Tikal’s “Black Space” (Cosmic Dragon, 2008), the title track deploying some of most significant dialogue in the history of the Apollo programme. Neil Armstrong from the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility: “Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed.” A likely smirk in recognition, for example, of the implications of post-DMT inhalations, the response of Houston Flight Centre crew to the Apollo 11 astronauts (and the world): “Roger Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again.”
A host of artists have stepped into this momentous exhalation in space-time. Part of a masterful achievement in sonic psy-fi, Space Monkey’s “Game Over” (Psychotic Episode, 2004) approaches the cosmic threshold with a rousing horn section and a towering bass line. On the threshold of the doorway to the Moon:
Armstrong: “Everything is go here. We’re just waiting for the cabin pressure to bleed to a low enough pressure to open the hatch. It’s about .1 on our gauge now”
Houston: “We’re seeing relatively static pressure in your cabin. Do you think you can open the hatch at this pressure?
Armstrong: “We’re going to try it. The hatch is coming open.”
Over on the chill floor, ambient artist Alpha Wave Movement picks up the soundtrack on “No Mans Land” (A Distant Signal, 2002). “I’m gonna step off the LM [lunar module] now,” Armstrong announces ahead of Floyd-like synth melodies. And from “Mapping The Heavens” on that album, Armstrong recites his immortal line: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. Having crossed into the Sea of Tranquility an astral euphoria has been achieved from which a sense of universalism is obtained, perhaps best conveyed through the announcements of President Nixon in radio conversation with Armstrong and Aldrin at their off-world base, Tranquility. It is a popular speech, sampled by Astra Projection on their euphoric testament to the moment of singularity, “One” (Psy-Trance Euphoria 2, 2009).
With omission of any reference to national identity, and with Nixon’s identity hidden to those unfamiliar (I assume the great majority of listeners), it comes over as the outcome of a kind of cosmic communitas, and an affirmation of self mainlined in communion with the Godhead: “This has to be the proudest day of our lives. And for people all over the world, I am sure they too join … For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one; one in their pride at what you have done”. The Moon landing was the context for an unparalleled televisualised peak experience, one in which differences of state were momentarily set aside, and where the project of the self became, to paraphrase Turner, coterminous with that of the human species. The narrative would be popular in trance. For instance, singing an ode to the Goa foundations on their epic “Summer 89” Israelis California Sunshine use “all of the people of this Earth are truly one”, from the hypnotic album Trance (1997) which also includes “The New King” where a boy repeats: “we came in peace for all mankind”.
This peon to communion in space had been early forecast by science fiction editor and founder of the American Interplanetary Society, David Lasser, in his book The Conquest of Space (1931) where rocket-propelled spaceflight would facilitate the transcendence of national jealousies, racial differences and class conflict, with rocket science, as De Witt Douglas Kilgore demonstrates in his fascinating study Astrofuturism: Science, Race and Visions of Utopia in Space (2003) functioning as a grand unifying project orchestrating the evolutionary leap into global peace. Human presence on the Moon had long been imagined as the marker of transition from inter-ethnic strife, a theme that can be read in the voice of Neil Armstrong who speaks from the Moon on Tikal’s “Overdrive” (Carnival, 2005): “It’s a great honor and privilege for us to be here representing not only the United States, but men of peace of all nations and with interest and a curiosity and with a vision for the future.” The lunar revelation was brought home by Goa trance collaboration Moog (Jean-Loup Kehrig, Nicolas Ledent and Thierry Gotti), who, in 1994, produced the track-length odyssey “Euromotors” in which Aldrin reports to Houston that the lunar-landing crown-chakra communion “inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to earth.”
Coming Down, to Earth
It could be argued that this lunar performance have been deployed by the transnationalists of psychedelic trance to convey their investment in a planetary vibe, one readily articulated, for instance, at Portugal's Boom Festival or Total Solar Eclipse Festivals. But probably the most significant space-borne revelation sampled within psychedelic trance can be detected on Astral Projection’s second CD release, where the only words on the track “Black and White” are retrospective commentary from Apollo 8 mission Commander Frank Borman: “And the view of the Earth, it was the only place in the universe that had any color. Everything else was black and white” (Trust in Trance, 1996).
The comments speak to what has been identified as the greatest revelation of the Apollo missions—deriving not from rocks gathered on the Moon, but from Earth, the awesome spectacle of which over the lunar horizon startled Borman and his crew, the first humans to witness the Earth from the Moon’s orbit (literally from the “dark side” of the Moon). Indeed the “Earthrise” photograph taken by crewman William Anders would become the Rosetta Stone of the environmental movement. The image of our blue turning globe, small and vulnerable in the vastness of space was, according British space historian Robert Poole, “an epiphany in space… a rebuke to the vanity of humankind”.
In an essay he wrote in the early 1970s, “The Moon Walk – the Outward Journey”, declaring the lunar mission and its broadcasting as a moment which should unburden humanity from enthrallment to external divinity, Campbell himself stated: “Now there is a telling image: this earth, the one oasis in all space, an extraordinary kind of sacred grove…. the entire globe now a sanctuary, a set-apart Blessed Place. Moreover, we have all now seen for our-selves how very small is our heaven-born earth, and how perilous our position on the surface of its whirling, luminously beautiful orb”. As “an outward journey …. into our selves”, the trip to the Moon, he declared, “has transformed, deepened, and extended human consciousness to a degree and in a manner that amounts to the opening of a new spiritual era".
Offering what has been referred to as the “Overview Effect”, Earthrise and the later Whole Earth image taken on the Apollo 17 mission (1972), would confirm the idea of “Spaceship Earth” (a phrase coined by Buckminster Fuller), provide the stimulus for the “Gaia hypothesis” and inspire the popular expression of ecological and humanitarian concerns, illustrating for the first time that the Earth is an autonomous, self-regulating biosphere.
“Spaceship Earth” was memorialised by numerous artists from the Goa period. Sheyba’s “Into the Fourth Dimension”, first released on the EP by that name (1995), features an enthused astronaut: “When I was in space, the most profound experience was to see this little planet from that distance”. The following year, the space-struck Asia 2001 laid down the gnosis on “Râ” (Râ, 1996): “Gaia became visible through the new knowledge about the Earth gained from space. Gaia is the Earth seen as a single physiological system, an entity that is alive”. By using these samples, Goa producers were enabling dance floor habitués to approximate the revelatory satori, to make the “leap of the human spirit”, as Campbell had it, already made by NASA's space voyagers.
The theme persists. Over ten years later, Filteria attempted to reproduce that moment of speechless ascension on the space operatic “Earthrise” (on Daze Of Our Lives, 2009).
Apparently, the Overview Effect also impacted Frenchman Brice Fruyt (aka Merr0w) whose Goa-inspired concept album Born Underwater (2009) was produced to evoke the Overview Effect, his “Blue Planet” promoted as “a heartbreaking ambient ode to the beauty and fragility of our planet and its seas”. And, having initiated a launch into zero gravity, Aphid Moon’s ascending opus “Go For Orbit” drops the payload delivered by the last man to walk the moon, Apollo 17 Commander Eugene Cernan:
You really know where you at this point in time and space, and in reality and in existence, when you look out the window and you’re looking back at the most beautiful star in the heavens, the most beautiful because it’s the one we understand and know it as home, its humanity, its people, family, love and live. You can see from pole to pole, and across oceans and continents and you can watch it turn and there’s no strings holding it up. And its moving in a blankness that is almost beyond conception (from Al Reinert’s 1989 documentary For All Mankind).
It might not be "Thus Sprake Zarathustra", but Ovnimoon’s “Sacred Earth” (Geometric Poetry, 2009) might be one of many soundtracks to the frisson by which one is gripped in that first moment when Earth (the Mother) is sighted in naked space. Beyond conception.
The awesome spectacle of Earthrise is often recaptured in poster art and event décor. For instance, as advertised in the November 2000 edition of Mushroom Magazine, an event called Euphoria in Hamburg on 11-11-2000, and featuring Star Sounds Orchestra and Haldolium, was promoted using the Earthrise image. Such imagery would become pervasive, indeed integrated in artistic conception and stage design as in the concerted efforts by the Orb in the early 1990s during their U.F.Orb tour. But the concerted space flight would be taken much further by the awe-struck violin-electronic virtuoso Kenji Williams in his ongoing multi-media performance Bella Gaia: An Experience. For participants, the performance is designed to reproduce the effect of a flight into space, delivering an experience that is said to “evolve our perspective of, and connection to, our home planet.” Inspired by astronauts for whom the Overview Earth had been a life-changing experience, and performed in planetariums, Bella Gaia involves NASA/MODIS satellite imagery, orbiting visualisations of Earth from space, along with earthbound imagery celebrating the diverse cultural heritage of Earth’s human inhabitants. In promotions for the performance, it is stated that the sight of Earth from space is characterised by:
a dramatic cognitive shift in which the significance of man-made boundaries is eclipsed by a deep awareness that life on Earth operates as a borderless, interconnected whole. The striking clarity of this realization often triggers a keen sense of stewardship that seeks community beyond the limits of nationality and religion. The strength of this conservation instinct tends to grow even after the return to Earth, driving those who share this experience to reach out, and become highly active participants in the preservation of our common heritage. And, furthermore, Williams states, the performance is designed to stimulate a renewed purpose to "maintain, preserve, and protect the Earth, as if the Earth itself is a world heritage site" (see performance trailer).
The planetarium might be remote from the dance floor, and it might seem like a long way from the new spiritualist commitment to an evolving self inflected within cosmic trance where an assemblage of digital, cyber and chemical tools have been the prosthetics for the remastering of subjectivity. But the ultimate result of the self-transcendence is the emergence of a global perspective, and the descendants of cosmic trance and other musics are deploying their multi-media tool kits in the service of the planet.
Within the context of spaceflight and intergalactic travel, transcendence becomes especially interesting when contextualising the encounter with aliens, or indeed our alien self. Stay tuned for that story.
This piece has been produced as part of a larger project on the intersections of technology and religion in psytrance, to be published in my forthcoming book Global Tribe: Religion, Technology and Psytrance Culture. Parts of this will also be published in Hyper-Real Religions edited by Adam Possamai.
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Many thanks to Kathleen Williamson for allowing me to gaze aloft from the observation deck near Nimbin, Australia. For more work by Graham St. John go to: http://edgecentral.blogspot.com
Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures
