Brian Eno’s Apollo
Science Museum, London
Sound has a unique power to enhance and enrich the visual experience. One only has to think of the epic slide guitar soundscapes created by Ry Cooder which have so defined the films of Wim Wenders. And who can forget Miles Davis’s haunting trumpet score for Louis Malle’s L’Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud in 1958?
In the same way, Brian Eno’s musical vision has long been realised in widescreen during a journey which has covered glam and experimental rock via ambient electronica. So the Science Museum and Sound and Music’s decision to commission composer Woojun Lee to revisit his 1983 album Apollo alongside images from Al Reinhert’s epic documentary film about the lunar missions, For All Mankind, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, was an inspired one.
Alongside the original Apollo 10 capsule in the vast hall of the museum’s Making the Modern World Gallery, composer and performer Iris Garrelfs prepared the audience for lift off with an intriguing set of laptop derived sonic sculptures which evoked swooshing black holes, intergalactic snow storms and a pulsating, eerie nothingness. Elsewhere, sound artist Douglas Benford’s interstellar explorations plunged into telescopic depths and throbbing moonquakes.
With a surface area of more than 400 metres, the giant Imax screen bathed the viewer in a wraparound vastness, while ensemble Icebreaker and pedal steel guitarist BJ Cole’s soundscape conjured a molten expansiveness amid embarkation’s crushing cascade of launch lava and smithereens of liquid gold. The limitations of the kaleidoscopic, grainy footage were actually a strength, as the capsule pulled away from the rocket above the Earth, while oceanic groans and aquatic bleeps mirrored the shift into the lunar stratosphere.
Golden country and western chords shimmered as the horizon strained to appear, with dawn radiating in the distance. Six of the seven Apollo 11 astronauts took cassettes of country music, – the other took Berlioz – “zero-gravity country music”, as Eno describes it. The glorious An Ending (Ascent) was a tearful lunar ode from whence the tiny orb of terra firma descended into the heavens.
Of course, the moon landings were mind-bogglingly expensive acts of imperial hubris – the last man there was Eugene Cernan in 1972 – but this sublime multimedia extravaganza was a reminder of the extent of the ontological shift into the unknown they represented and how, four decades on, we are still trying to work out what it all means.
James McGowan
