The Music
The album contains a variety of styles. "Under Stars", "The Secret Place", "Matta", "Signals", "Under Stars II" and "Stars" are all dark, complicated textures similar to those on Eno’s previous album Ambient 4/On Land. "An Ending (Ascent)" "Drift" and "Always Returning" are smoother electronic pieces. "Silver Morning", "Deep Blue Day" and "Weightless" are country and western inspired ambient pieces featuring Daniel Lanois on guitar.
Country music, which Eno listened to as a child in Woodbridge on American armed forces radio, was used to "give the impression of weightless space" 1.
"Under Stars" is a recurring theme in the album, first appearing as an ambient electronic bed behind a treated guitar. "Under Stars II" is the same composition, but with different effects and treatments. "Stars" is the pure background texture without the guitar.
The track "An Ending (Ascent)" was sampled in the song "Hear Me Out" by the group Frou Frou, additionally in "Forgive" by British produced Burial_(musician) and has been used in several films, such as Traffic and 28 Days Later and in the London Olympiad opening (the memorial wall section).
Many of the tracks on the album were recorded with soft "attacks" of each note, then played backwards, with multiple heavy echoes and reverb added in both directions to merge the notes into one long flowing sound with each note greatly overlapping each adjacent note, producing the "floating" effects that Eno desired.
The Yamaha DX7 was used extensively by Eno on the album. "...so many processings and reprocessings - it's a bit like making soup from the leftovers of the day before, which in turn was made from leftovers..." (making the album) Eno said, ".... Well, I love that music anyway .... what I find impressive about that music is that it’s very concerned with space in a funny way. Its sound is the sound of a mythical space, the mythical American frontier space that doesn’t really exist anymore. That’s why on Apollo I thought it very appropriate, because it’s very much like "space music" — it has all the connotations of pioneering, of the American myth of the brave individual...." (on country music) 4.
Read more about this topic: Apollo: Atmospheres And Soundtracks
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world—so that the moment of intense turning seems still and universal—all are here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“The music is in minors.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)