Outer space, as audio aesthetic or fantastic theme, opened up music beyond the burgeoning electronic genre. The Moog synthesizer, making its debut of sorts at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, did the most to bring electronic into the mainstream because it was able to be commercially manufactured. The space theme is explicit across all tracks with titles like “Unidentified Flying Object”, “The Little Man from Mars”, and the utterly goofy “Barnyard in Orbit”. The In Sound From Way Out!, released in 1966 by master innovators Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley, aspired to create zippy little songs that “might be heard soon from the jukeboxes at the interplanetary way stations” - according to the original liner notes. Much early electronic music experimented with dissonance and cacophony more than melody, widely perceived as weird but inaccessible. Even the terminology sounded futuristic, with modulators, wobbulators, oscillators, sine waves, vacuum tubes, and magnetic tape loops. New electronic instruments represented the future of music and their blinking, circuitry-riddled looks, much like their beep-bips and “ziwzih ziwzih” sounds (to borrow a Derbyshire title), linked up easily with a future-tech vision of spaceship interiors. Who theme in 1963 at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop where she was surrounded by imposing computers and switchboards. His landmark album Other Worlds Other Sounds (1958), though its cover envisions a dancer on the moon’s surface, offers no explicit space theme to connect the tracks, only arrangements marked by newfangled studio wizardry.ĭeliah Derbyshire, an eccentric British pioneer in electronic music, created the iconic Dr. Latin sensation Esquivel is surely the “father” of the genre. Though not electronic music, the subgenre quirked-up standards like “Sentimental Journey” inside a space frame. Sid Bass’s From Another World (1956), Les Baxter’s Space Escapade (1958), and Dick Hyman’s Moon Gas (1963) featuring Mary Mayo are stellar examples. The retrospectively named genre Space Age Pop served as a soundtrack for the Space Age from the mid-’50s into the mid-’60s, aligned with era advances in stereophonic sound and high fidelity (hi-fi) home stereos. These scores relied on technology that quickly evolved over the next two decades, pivoting on the breakout Moog synthesizer that would be heard across genres. Theremin-driven scores for sci-fi movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), as well as the first all-electronic score for Forbidden Planet (1956), had already established the outer space soundscape: hovering tones, propulsive pitches, sonic waves from a galaxy away, abstracted melodies, radar repetitions. The Space Age began with the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, effectively beginning the Space Race, and intensified the popular imagination’s focus on futurism and worlds beyond our own. The pop culture phenomenon of Space Disco can be seen as a logical extension of the Space Age, its accompanying sci-fi sensibility, and the evolution of music-making technology. Space Disco did not begin with Star Wars, at any rate, its long fuse reaches back decades. Though an instant cliché, commercially, Space Disco can be far more dynamic, too: fatuous or subversive, sexual or sexist, unifying or diversifying, utopian or dystopian, bringing wonder or apocalypse, offering escape or reflection. At its best, Space Disco sounds less like Meco’s effects-sampling gimmickry and more streamlined and pulsing like Giorgio Moroder’s synth-instrumental “Chase” (1978). Space Disco had taken off and it remained in orbit for nearly a decade. Meco’s disco version of the Star Wars theme hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in October of 1977, selling two million copies internationally.
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