This is a good point. A popular sense of “spacey sound” had been firmly established by the mid-to-late 1950s, and it doesn’t seem to have changed much since. Its many touchstones include the final movement of Holst’s The Planets, shortwave tuning noises, the soundtracks of popular science fiction films (like The Day the Earth Stood Still and the aforementioned Forbidden Planet), Sputnik-1’s world-spanning telemetry, and the then-novel sonic emissions of various “space age” electronic devices, musical and otherwise.
Analog synthesizers and the ultra-vivid sonic landscapes of later sci-fi classics like Star Trek and 2001 may have broadened the palette of familiar “space music” tropes in the 1960s, but they didn’t substantially alter its unifying principles. Whether to the wondrous far future or the ominous depths of space, one’s cosmic travels reliably came accompanied by eerie atonal drones, lonely piezoelectric beeps, vertiginous stereo field trickery, electronic oscillations and distortions, and (or course) quasi-human vocal tones ghosting the trackless void.
As a result, in attempting to project rock music beyond the earthly here & now, musicians in the late 60s and 1970s could simply retrofit a few of these by-then decades-old signifiers. Fire up the ring modulator, a flanger, and that one weird noise you found on Alan’s Moog when you were unspeakably high, chug & drone all starry-eyed until the shakes set in, run the tapes through the Joe Meek echo chamber a couple times… and ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space.
Always loved that Montrose song. It sounds like if Hawkwind were from sunny marijuana California instead dreary hash smoke England. Nothing against Hawkwind, but their space fantasies were more like a bad trip starship malfunction, instead of blasting through the galaxy with a space babe looking for a party like Montrose.
Here’s a little ditty some of you may be familiar with, for what is space without time?
I used to race home from school to watch this on our black and white TV - that’s OK the original wasn’t filmed in colour - and I got as big a buzz out of the theme and the spacey opening images as the show itself.
It;s really worth watching how this music was made:
Now, Delia Derbyshire was a bit of a superstar in her time for avante garde music. Check out:
The ondes martenot isn’t particularly something you would go to if you wanted to imitate singing. You’d want a formant filter on it for that. Star Trek sounds like, and apparently is, just singing.
Whoops! I’m late to that party.
Props to Attilio Mineo’s man in space with sounds, or a whole load of space age bachelor pad music like les Baxter which used the then vogueish trope of space travel and fused it with delay, reverb, theremins/ondes martenot, ring mudulators, oscillators, and really really lush syrupy strings. Along with all the avant garde electronic music laboratories around the world at the time.
Which seems to be a sequence about leaving earth and finding somewhere new. It is pretty good, to my ear. Sadly, I cannot find it anywhere online to provide a link to, not even samples on Amazon UK, so I cannot help anyone who wants to listen**. It was apparently reissued on CD twice in the 1990s, so it clearly did not disappear without trace but I’ve never come across anyone else who has heard it.
And in an odd twist of space rock theme continuity, Paul Chapman, the guitarist, also played with Michael Schenker of UFO fame and filled in for him on a UFO tour when Schenker was unavailable.
** There are, of course, mp3 versions on my ipod which could in theory be emailed/uploaded somewhere if someone were desperate…but if you were that desperate you could buy cheap CD version somehwere, I’m sure.
Imho although they didn’t really have other ‘hits’ they are more than a one hit wonder. I like most of their stuff a lot. Their first single is brilliant as well.
I read the Guardian article, which at the end links to a video discussing/demonstrating the Ondes Martinot. And at the end of that video (worth watching from the start) there’s 30 seconds of this:
(@smulder@athos)
That is a great video (and I had watched it before but not to the end!) but to be clear I don’t think St used it. When he plays the theme there it sounds like ondes martenot rather than voices unlike the original which does. The ondes martenot’s thing is the pitch glissandi and the varying timbres via the speakers and waveforms but it doesn’t have filters like classic subtractive synthesis and if you want to emulate voices you would typically use formant filters which sound a bit like a guitar talk box (whihh uses an actual mouth and the resonance of it to create the formants). The OM also has great envelope control {which he demos in that video with slow attacks) so I guess it sounds a bit more singing than a musical saw.
I suppose what I like about the OM, and theremin, is that they weren’t trying to sound like anything else. Unlike some earlier synthesis like the panharmoniim/tel harmonium which used tone wheels like the much later Hammond organ to emulate instruments. That’s worth looking up too if you are interested in synthesis history.
That cover is a pastiche of the Atillio Mineo record I mentioned earlier (which was for the Seattle worlds fair IIRC, for the ride up to the space needle. Kind of like how they used Varese and Xenakis for the Philips pavilion at the Brussels worlds fair. Why don’t they have them any more?).
