LINK: Fables of the Reconstruction - Hawkwind

In 1977, NASA launched a pair of LPs made of copper and gold into space. Both were attached to the Voyager I and II, a couple of spacecraft that examined Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus and are now drifting past the outer reaches of our solar system, and they’ll continue doing so, presumably forever. The records are for whoever or whatever finds them. They contain images from earth encoded into their grooves and about 90 minutes of music that was chosen to give a sense of what humankind is like. There are Western masterpieces by Mozart, Bach and Beethoven, of course, and prime examples of music from the Far East, Middle East and Africa, and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”. As wonderful as this gesture was, I can’t help but believe that they made a grave error by not including any Hawkwind. I think that of all the music from our little blue ball in space, Hawkwind’s would best speak to the souls of extra terrestrials, because they were the lords of Space Rock.

Other fans might argue with me, but the Hawkwind record I’d choose for inclusion on the interstellar comp would be In Search of Space. It’s their second album, released in 1971, and the first where they fully embraced the sci-fi aesthetic. When the aliens figure out how to play the golden record with the diamond stylus that comes with it, they’ll hear familiar cosmic sounds: the light ticking of radar signals, blobular pulsations like those from a vast cloud of cosmic dust, the built up pressure of pent-up nuclear energy, a metronomic countdown and then, blast off! Their ears will be rocketing though space like intergalactic bandits on a star-faring hot rod. In earthly terms, the opening track, a 15+ minute epic called “You Shouldn’t Do That,” has an early heavy metal/proto-punk feel -- a couple of chords played fast and hard, but all throughout are strange oscillations and vibrations of space tones, like the sound effects from movies where little green men shoot laser beams and photon waves. And all these sounds weave and meld together into a singular force of forward momentum that’ll likely please the ears and minds of whatever ultra-intelligent beings happen to find them.

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