The Space Project

Last Thanksgiving, Matt Halverson, who runs the Portland-based label Lefse Records, was talking with his brother in law, Exogenesis President and Chief Scientist Sean Anklam, who described a trove of recordings the NASA-launched Voyager space probes had made in the outer solar system. Halverson, the Walter White to Anklam's Hank Schrader, was overtaken by an idea: to commission imaginative artists to create songs and soundscapes out of the Voyager recordings. 'The Space Project' album consists of 14 tracks, seven pairs of songs, each based on a distinct celestial body: the planets Jupiter (Porcelain Raft, The Antlers), Neptune (Spiritualized 'Mississippi Space Program', The Holydrug Couple), Uranus (Youth Lagoon, Blues Control), Saturn (Beach House, Zomes) and Earth (Absolutely Free, Jesu), and the moons Miranda (Mutual Benefit, Anna Meredith) and Io (Benoit and Sergio, Larry Gus).