Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks

Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks is a studio album by the British musician and producer Brian Eno, the Canadian producer Daniel Lanois, and the composer Roger Eno, who is Brian Eno's brother. It was released on 29 July 1983 through EG Records. The music was originally written for a documentary film about the Apollo program, For All Mankind, though the film was not released until 1989. The music was written and performed by the trio. Music from the album has appeared in the films 28 Days Later, Traffic, and Trainspotting, whose soundtrack sold approximately four million copies. Two of the songs from the album, "Silver Morning" and "Deep Blue Day", were issued as a 7" single on EG Records. 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 -inspired ambient pieces featuring Daniel Lanois on pedal steel 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." "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 , in "Forgive" by British producer Burial , in "Ascent" by Michael Dow, a London electronic music producer, and in "The Ending" by British DJ Graham Gold . It has also been used in several films, such as Traffic and 28 Days Later , and in the memorial wall section of the London Olympiad opening . 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. Daniel Lanois stated in an interview with Noisey about the album that the "foundation" of the song "Deep Blue Day" was a Suzuki Omnichord that was heavily slowed down from the original tempo that it was recorded at. In an interview with Gearspace , Lanois has also mentioned that a Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer, a Strat guitar, and a Sho-Bud steel guitar were used in the song. Eno once stated regarding the soundtrack: "...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..." 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...."