Brian Eno - Weightless (3B)

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Like everybody else, I sat and watched the first moon landing and the films from the subsequent missions. But for two reasons this television coverage left me unsatisfied. First, I felt that the small screen with its shallow colours was quite inadequate to the vastness of space. It made the whole enterprise look like an inferior edition of 'startrek'. Secondly, it seemed to me that the fear of boring the general public had led the editors and commentators to present the transmissions from space in an up tempo, 'newsy' manner that was unsympathetic: short shots, fast cuts and too many experts obscuring the grandeur and strangeness of the event with a paint of down-to-earth chatter. Late last year I received an invitation from Al Reinert to make music for his film of the Apollo missions. Reading his letter and notes for the film , I came to think that here might be the definitive document of these amazing expeditions. Reinert had seen all of the film shot during those missions - 6,000,000 feet of it, and had chosen his footage from that huge collection. He had also interviewed the astronauts who travelled on the missions, discovering how they felt about the experience. All of the film he has used is from NASA archives, and the only voices heard are those of the astronauts reflecting on their journey or talking with Mission Control. I was excited by this project, it afforded an opportunity to explore the feelings of space travel: being weightless, seeing the night time campfires of Saharan Nomads from high above the Earth, looking back to a little blue planet drifting alone in space, looking out into the endless darkness beyond, and finally stepping onto another planet. I don't see this as an adventure film, and I have not written adventure music. What this film can do is to present a set of moods, a unique mixture of feelings that quite possibly no human had ever experienced before. Thus expanding the vocabulary of human feeling just as those missions has expanded the boundaries of out universe. I hope this music will assist in that.

- Brian Eno, May 19th 1983