“We meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance,” famously spoke John F Kennedy in 1962. “We choose to go to the moon!” And so have, in a manner of speaking, Public Service Broadcasting, the unlikely looking pair of dance and pop geeks, who have forged a relatively unique concept, the artful juxtaposition of speech and audio from the past, with the sounds of now, both electronic and analogue. Of course, many acts from the past (for instance, Big Audio Dynamite on E=Mc2) have incorporated found speech into musical recordings, and Steinski & Mass Media in particular utilised this approach as their modus operandi. But PSB are perhaps the only act to have built an entire album around found speech and audio, without overt political motive.

While their debut album Inform-Educate-Entertain was successfully conceptualised around British and American propaganda and public safety film and audio of the 30s-50s in particular, The Race For Space employs a mix of the propagandist and ‘live’ audio captured in the control room of Houston, as it attempts to trace this historic ‘race’, conducted at the height of the Cold War, between the arch enemies of the USA and USSR. Both the Cold War and the race for space both gripped and frightened the people of planet Earth, but while the Cold War remained the ultimate nightmare, with the prospect of wholesale annihilation a distinct possibility at the push of a button or two, the two superpower’s respective ventures into space were an awe-inspiring spectacle, as scientific and technological advances made space travel and exploration possible, and all the while happening with the advent of television and mass communications.

Of course, you would need to study long and hard to fully understand and appreciate the history of this endeavour, and the multifarious contexts within which it happened; social, economic, cultural, technological, and political. But nevertheless, it may help to spark in some, particularly the younger members of our planet, a desire to delve deeper into this momentous story, an on-going saga that recently saw the landing of Rosetta on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, an event that hogged news bulletins for weeks… Indeed, PSB have once again achieved what they explicitly implied via the title of their first album; to inform, to educate, and to entertain. And with the pleasant rock, pop, ambient and electronic beats of messrs J. Willgoose and Wrigglesworth (their stage names) at the controls, PSB are first and foremost about entertaining, as their live shows testify, gigs that have that crucial extra ingredient of being visual; the banks of TVs on stage playing out the various films that the audio recordings cannot show…

Beginning with those rallying words of President Kennedy – accompanied by a choral backdrop written by PSB – The Race For Space covers the period between 1957 and 1972, bookended by the launch of the first space satellite (Sputnik 1) and the last moon mission (Apollo 17), largely, but not exclusively, in strict chronological order. It is built with many samples taken from the British Film Institute, NASA Audio Collection and the Apollo Flight Journals, many of which have not previously been available to the public.

Incorporating an eclectic brew of sounds and styles, from the slowly building Leftfield-inspired brooding beats and burbling synths of Sputnik to the high energy funky-brass grooves of Gagarin; and from the haunting soundscapes of Fire In The Cockpit – which depicts the tragedy of Apollo 1 when astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee lost their lives – to Valentina, which reminds us of the story of the first female cosmonaut in space, Valentina Tereshkova, with the help of guest vocalists, the Smoke Faeries, PSB are demonstrably skilled composers. arrangers. Alled to their production skills, the conjunction of PSB’s music, and the audio voices emanating from Houston and Moscow, is rousing, particularly on the emotional The Other Side, which depicts the moment when the manned Apollo 8 ventured around the dark side of the moon, transmission lost for a time, no-one not knowing the eventual outcome… And then there’s the glorious lift-off of Go!, which eschews the obvious and famous recordings that exist, in favour of audio straight from the control room of Houston, detailing the extraordinary mission of Apollo 11, which contained the crew that became the first people to walk on the moon.

PSB acknowledge within the useful liner notes the difficulty of compressing a huge slice of history into 43 minutes of ”almost pop”. Instead they have decided to select some, if not all, of the more momentous and gripping stories that interested them, on an emotional and intellectual level, setting them against and beside each other, and then thematically tying them together, whilst utilising many different musical styles, sometimes with incongruous purpose. There are also, as the liner notes point out, some interesting audio techniques within the album, but which maybe only audiophiles will detect.

The race for space had it all – tragedy through to triumph. And so does, within the implicit time restraints, the album. It’s a story intelligently put together, and yet packing an emotional punch that is sympathetic and appropriate to the subject matter in hand. Especially with headphones on…

Jeff Hemmings

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