8 TRACKS: To Travel In Space Like A Kosmonaut With Rodion

Since I was a child I always dreamt about travelling in space, exploring distant galaxies, getting lost in forbidden nebulas. I watched a lot of space related TV when I was a kid in the early 80s. There are no better sounds than electronic ones to describe the feelings of travelling in space, so probably my fascination for electronic music also comes out of my love for interstellar things. But I’ve always been quite far away from the american Apollo vision of the space race, with its sense of conquest, supremacy… I always found it slightly cheap and unnecessarily celebratory. I always have been convinced that they faked the whole moon landing thing and actually never went up there. So to me the only real space travellers remain the Soviets and when I think about space I think about a mellow place, where lonely space travellers can embrace the desolate hugeness of cosmos and think about the boundaries of knowledge and space. It’s more of an intimate voyage to me.

Daft Punk are among the ones who took this space travel electronic aestethic to the top, especially with their Discovery album. The name says quite it all.

The late 70s works of Giorgio Moroder have always been a great source of inspiration for me.
His sound at the time was the sound of the future, but the future is not necessarily a happy one.
This tune was originally written for Battlestar Galactica and there’s a peculiar sense of space in it:
I like because it doesn’t celebrate space like the main album tune, rather it leads us through a worried walk through dangerous and filthy constellations.

I wrote this tune some 10 years ago and it was included in my first LP on Gomma.
I dedicated it to the Milky Way, and it’s chorus features a breed of sweet cosmic mellowness that I always enjoyed.

This track was released on the very first Autechre album on Warp in 1993, which influenced my vision of electronic music quite a lot.
Since the very first sound this tune and album gave me visions of a dark galaxy, alien machines and claustrophobic alien moon landscapes. Again, space is not necessarily a nice place to find yourself in.

A genius tribute to John Barry, this ceephax version of “capsule in space” makes me think about a frantic ride on a giant solarstorm wave.

One of the rare cases in which popular club hits really have something meaningful to tell.
I love Fluegel’s style, his sounds are so raw, apparently simple and always properly balanced.
He never sounds cheap to my ears, even when he attempts at heavily melodic space-age music like this.

I can hear a lot of Lindstrom’s early works’ influence in this Moscoman tune,
but he managed to make it sound clearer, simpler, more modern.
It could just be the perfect soundtrack for a Kosmonaut ride.

One of my favourite tracks from Swedish maestro Bogdan Irkuk.
This is the kind of music that probably resonates in your heart when you look at your distant planet and life from distant skies above it…