BRIAN ENO & DANIEL LENOIR ‘APOLLO’ 1983 FIRST PRESSING AN AMBIENT CLASSIC

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BRIAN ENO & DANIEL LENOIR ~ ‘APOLLO’ ~ 1983 FIRST PRESSING ~ AN AMBIENT CLASSIC!

ARTIST: BRIAN ENO & DANIEL LENOIR

TITLE: "APOLLO: ATMOSPHERES AND SOUNDTRACKS"

LABEL:  E.G. RECORDS LTD.

FORMAT:  12” 33 RPM VINYL

DETAILS:  ORIGINAL FIRST US PRESSING 1983

MASTERED:  STERLING SOUNDS BY GREG CALBI

PRESSING:  PRESSED AT HUB-SERVAL RECORD CORP.

STYLE/GENRE:  AMBIENT ELECTRONIC PSYCHEDELIC

‘Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks’ is an essential album. First released in 1983, it has long been recognized as one of the major accomplishments of ambient composition. ‘Apollo’ is an atmospheric masterpiece recorded by Brian Eno, his brother Roger on Piano and a young Canadian guitarist and producer named Daniel Lanois.

The album was originally commissioned as the score to a feature-length documentary by director Al Reinert that made use of previously unseen 35mm NASA footage of the various Apollo moon missions. Brian Eno’s ambient musical style seemed to be a perfect match for a film about the Apollo moon missions.

The film and its ethereal, ambient, electronic musical soundtrack by Eno wasn’t well received by audiences at the time. Reinhart extensively reworked and reedited the film, took out a lot of footage, took out a lot of Eno’s music, and replaced the soundtrack with work by other artists, leaving only a few of Eno’s original compositions. The film was rereleased in 1989 under the title ‘For All Mankind’

But, in the meantime, Eno’s original soundtrack had taken off and developed a cult following of its own. Eno’s ambient but ambitious music fit the original theatrical piece perfectly and the tracks became well-known and established in their own right as standalone compositions. The original 1983 album was already regarded by many as an ambient masterpiece.

In the liner notes on the back of the album, Eno describes his experience of watching the Apollo 11 landing in 1969 and his sense that the strangeness and unknown aspects of the mission were ruined by the hype, the poor TV signal quality and the artificial exuberance of TV journalists.

Eno felt that the melodramatic and uptempo way the event was presented to the world was not at all what the astronauts felt or perceived. Not at all what it really felt like to be adrift in space. Eno composed this album trying to avoid the 60s sensationalism, instead preferring to express how he imagined actually being in space would feel. That turns out to be a much wider range of moods than one might think.

To Eno, the essence of a moon landing mission was like exploring a new frontier. New sensations, new perspectives, new territory. He likened exploring space to the early cowboys exploring the new western frontier. That’s why some of the songs on the album have an eerie country music flavor to them, complete with Lanois’ strange slide guitar sounds. Space was the new ‘old west’, the new frontier.

Eno tried to write atmospheric music that reflected how someone would feel in the vast weightlessness and openness of outer space. Floating, disoriented, scared, shocked, amazed, excited and staring out into a ‘Deep Blue Day’

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This album interprets the vastness, beauty, grandeur and weightlessness of space in a variety of different approaches.

Eno and Lenois tried their best to translate into sound the amazing beauty and utter strangeness of the Apollo moon missions. The album’s music suggests that space is comforting and safe rather than cold, isolating, and unknowable.

The album is full of synthesizers, soft guitar and sounds that gently creep their way around the listener’s mind. The songs skillfully convey the many emotions associated with space travel: shock, awe, fear and peacefulness. The music tries to recreate the physical nature of weightlessness and the overwhelming sense of scale that can only be appreciated by being out in space. The subtle sounds and textures form a blanket of sound that gently wraps the listener in a warm essence. It all comes across as a kind of spiritual exaltation.

On learning that some of the astronauts took recordings of country music with them into space, Eno composed some "zero-gravity country music", with sweet slide guitar sunk deep into long, spacey reverberations. In 1998 Eno recalled “The idea was to try and make frontier space music of some kind.” Country music is very much like ‘space music’… it has all the connotations of pioneering, of the American myth of the brave individual, conquering the new and unknown. ‘Apollo’ contains modern space-age frontier music, a sort of interstellar exotica.

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Eno's music works like perfume. It washes over you, surrounds you, influences you, but doesn’t physically weigh you down. Like a quality perfume, it’s strong yet weightless.

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The Tracklist for this original 1983 release include:

Under Stars ~ The Secret Place

Matta ~ Signals

An Ending (Ascent)

Under Stars II ~ Drift

Silver Morning ~ Deep Blue Day

Weightless ~ Always Returning ~ Stars

‘Apollo’ starts off with the ambient piece ‘Under Stars’ in which gentle synthesizers sway as they entice you to look up at the sky and make use of your own imagination. To dream about what it would be like in space.

One part floaty ambience, another part slow-paced country, the guitar provided by Daniel Lanois rises the music on this album to something more than just ambient background music.

‘Weightless’ is a track that invokes a dreamscape wonderland as your mind floats out into space and then, suddenly, you realize you’re surrounded by a zillion stars. ‘Stars’ is one of the more upbeat, exuberant songs on the album.

‘Capsule’ has a slight country feel to it in chord structure, but is awash in soft guitars, delightful melodies and serene but strong bass. Strangely gurgling synthesizer sounds and animal-like growls turn ‘Matte’ into a quiet nightmare.

The great combination of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois caused some critics to claim this music approximated “Duane Eddy on Mars”

‘Deep Blue Day’ is the ‘Hit’ on this album. It has become one of Eno’s most recognized instrumentals thanks to the density of the synths and the warmth of Lanois’ pedal-steel playing. It’s warmly emphatic. This song, originally written for this soundtrack, has found its way into several other more modern pop culture films.

Right before this album was recorded, Eno discovered the Yamaha CS80, one of the first polyphonic synthesizers. It forms an essential part of this soundtrack. There’s plenty of use of his regular Yamaha DX7 as well. There are sections on this album where Eno goes off on his own solo exploratory missions.

 ‘The Secret Place’ and ‘Signals’ are both minimalistic pieces, sounding a bit like vintage Tangerine Dream. They are brooding, lonely and isolated sounding tracks, in a good way, making use of heavily treated guitars and synths soaked in echo and delay.

The tracks ‘Silver Morning’ and ‘Deep Blue Day’ both evoke a sort of weightless country & western, the soundtrack to an eternity drifting across the great plains of space. They both are powered and driven by Lanois’ languid pedal steel. Lanois’ acoustic guitar and lap steel radiate a sense of deep calm yet floating thru space.

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With the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings, the original ‘Apollo’ album underwent remastering and expansion .

Brian Eno, his brother Roger, and producer/artist Daniel Lanois returned to work together and created 11 new tracks, an entire second album, of similar styled songs to reimagine the 1989 soundtrack to ‘For All Mankind’. Actually, unlike the original album, where they all worked together in the studio, this set of expansion tracks were all worked on separately by the musicians from their own studios. When musicians regroup and try to improve on past work, it rarely works well. Many feel that the new ‘expansion’ album was excessive and unnecessary. Nothing beats the original LP. It was terrific and fine just the way it was.

Brian Eno had been experimenting with his ideas of ambient music for almost a decade, but this 1983 release, ‘Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks’ was one of the best and perhaps the finest, most refined example of ambient for the times.

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This is a fantastic album by Brian Eno, unquestionably the most important and influential figure in the ambient music scene. Eno actually coined the term “ambient music” with his seminal 1978 masterpiece ‘Ambient 1: Music for Airports’.

‘Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks’ is easily one of Eno's best and most accessible ambient albums, and an ideal starting point for anyone new to the genre. The production is warm and the music hardly sounds dated. The emotional range of this album is broad, from the dark and mysterious to the relaxing and ethereal, to the downright euphoric.

Eno has made several critically acclaimed ambient albums over the years, and this 1983 opus Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks is considered one of the finest of his discography. Despite the minimalistic nature of the music, there’s plenty to listen to buried in the mix here. It’s still a fascinating listen and is still is a classic of the genre.

This album has long been a favorite among Enophiles.

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