A sick image of a binary pulsar, courtesy of NASA
Advertisement
Advertisement
Photo by Tas Limur
Lustmord: I guess I could be clever and say that my relationship with space is that I live in it and that it has a very profound effect on my existence. But being glib aside, it's always fascinated me, the vastness of it. I'm an atheist, but you still wonder about stuff. As a kid, I remember looking at the stars, taking in the sheer scale of things. Then, as you grow up, you realize that it's way bigger than you thought! I don't think we have the capacity to understand how big it is. I find it fascinating that we tend to think of ourselves as individuals at the center of things. As a species, we think that at any given time in our history we're at our peak, we're cultured, we're intelligent. But when you stand back and look at [things from] a cosmic scale, our insignificance is really interesting. It's good to be aware of that and be humbled by it.
Advertisement
I grew up when the Apollo program was going on. I watched the moon landings live on TV. It was all fascinating and really exciting, what we as a species were doing. I was aware of the Voyager probes, the first man-made devices to leave the solar system. I was also aware that they were recording audio as well as they went. [I had the idea] sometime in the late 80s, but then how the fuck do you get [access to] those kinds of things? I grew up in Britain, and when you live on the other side of the world, things like NASA and the Voyager and Apollo are for all intents and purposes on another planet. You can't just go up there and knock on the door.So what happened?
I moved [to the United States] 23 years ago. I'd been living here for six or eight months, in the [San Fernando] Valley. I was having this conversation with my wife, and I mentioned I'd really like to do that project. Being a little bit smarter than I am, she said, "We live in LA now. Aren't the Jet Propulsion Labs in LA? They're probably in the Whitepages!" I rushed to get the phone book, and sure enough, they were in there. The next week, I spoke to somebody at reception, and explained that there were these Voyager recordings that I was aware of. She put me through to somebody else, who asked what I wanted. I explained and they asked for my address. They just sent me a box of the original cassettes!That was around '93 or '94. The stuff I got from them was two or three hours' worth, but only 10 minutes of it was usable. If I was going to make a Japanese noise album, it would have been perfect, but some of it was completely unlistenable. It took a long time, tracing possible sources, to slowly gather stuff. Only last year, 25 years since the original idea, I thought, "Well, I should actually get around to doing that thing." It's kind of a cool tagline…the album that took 25 years. Of course, not counting the millennia that it took the sounds to get here.What are the actual sounds?
There's all kinds of stuff. There's pulsars. A lot of it is radio astronomy stuff. There's quite a few galaxies in there. There's anomalous activity like dust clouds. It's mostly radio stuff that's pitched down. There's a lot of stuff going on out there, but since you're in a vacuum, you can't hear it.Like most of your work, Dark Matter can feel really overwhelming at times—which I think is what most people mean when they say it's "dark." Is there something that draws you to music like that?
It's about a concept of the unknown. We're not capable of really understanding the scale of the universe. What does a million dollars look like in single notes? No one really knows. Does it fit in a suitcase? It's much smaller than you probably think, but what about a billion? What about a trillion? What about a trillion trillion? We have no way of being able to comprehend any of this stuff. Our brains were evolved to survive in the grasslands and keep away from predators and stuff like that. We're here in order to breed, so the species keeps going. So when it comes to this cosmic scale stuff, we're not able to take that in.I guess some of these places are dark, in a primal sense. But I'm checking these things out; I've got a huge flashlight and I'm shining it on [the world]. I guess some people are uncomfortable with a light being shown on some things.