Music Arcades: Brian Eno: Apollo (Atmospheres and Soundtracks)

On the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing, I saw what I think was the world premiere of a new arrangement of Apollo at the Science Museum. Eno was there. Here are my notes of what he said:

Arrangement by Woojun Lee, whom Eno said he chose based solely on the music that he'd heard, only subsequently to read that Lee counted Eno as an influence.
Commented on the life that two tracks — An Ending (Ascent) and Deep Blue Day — had found beyond the film, in other films (including Trainspotting) and in ads.
The astronauts were each allowed to take a cassette of music, and all chose country music, apart from one who chose Berlioz, so Eno reflected this in his compositions.
The main cultural impact came with NASA's photograph of the whole earth, as campaigned for by Stewart Brand.
During most of the '60s Eno was antagonistic towards America because of the Vietnam War. On 01969-07-20 he was at Tom Phillips' house and they watched the landing out of general curiosity rather than special interest. The moment when he realised the enormity of what had been achieved was when he looked out of the window, saw the moon, and realised that what he was seeing on the TV was happening up there.

Lots of people have posted their own videos to accompany An Ending (Ascent) and Deep Blue Day on YouTube. And that use of pedal steel guitar in ambient pieces clearly influenced The KLF's Chill Out.

I didn't get as much out of the evening as John L Walters (I say that with the utmost respect to Mr Walters, who, let's not forget, has graced these very pages with his insights). I found myself wishing I'd caught the original For All Mankind film when it was broadcast a week or two before, so I could hear how the music had originally been used.

We got an edited version of the film at the Science Museum, with all the dialogue and voice over stripped out, which made it an almost entirely abstract experience. I'm not sure whether the re-arrangement from synthetic to traditional instruments was as successful as that done for Music for Airports. It might be just that I like the more formal composition of the latter. The re-arrangement arguably gives the sound more texture, a finer-grained detail. The trouble was that the projection of the edited film we saw was a poor quality digital one that went patchy and pixellated at certain points.