This track was inspired by a speech I recently heard by Herb Lassen, a NASA engineer who led the build of the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, given in 2001. Pioneer 10 launched on 3rd March 1972 and was the first spacecraft to traverse the asteroid belt, and the first to visit Jupiter, sending back images of its close fly-by on 3rd December 1973.

NASA received Pioneer 10's last radio signal in January 2003, from 7.4 billion miles away. 51yrs after its launch, Pioneer continues on, each year crossing 230 million miles, heading in the general direction of Aldebaran, the brightest star in the constellation Taurus. It may take a couple of million years to get there.

Snippets of Herb's speech are used in the track, alongside other clips from NASA's archive, from Discovery and Space Shuttle missions. The countdown is from STS-135, the 135th and final mission of the American Space Shuttle program (July 8th 2011). A section of Herb's inspiring speech is transcribed below:

"It is so open and empty, out in that space, that it's hard to believe, hard to understand. There is nothing in the way. A light year away is a long ways, and that spacecraft is going to see nothing much for that hundred thousand years, for a million years, for a hundred million years. In fact I think it's going to last beyond the life of the Earth, when the Sun, in seven billion years or so will expand and gobble up the Earth. So that will be an existing spacecraft, even at that time. That's quite a long life spacecraft"

Those words inspired me to write this music. I hope you enjoy it. The beautiful artwork was painted by an unnamed NASA artist, visualising the Pioneer 10 around the time of the launch.

There is nothing in the way

There Is Nothing In The Way

Field recording of a woodland walk, with a guitar and synth meditation.

Guitar In The Woods

Produced for a short flim reminiscing on Chapel Allerton, a suburb of Leeds, Yorkshire, UK. Incorporates an improvised piano piece with manipulated field recordings from the area.

Memories Of Chapel Allerton

Produced using time-stretched string and bell samples, with more melodic elements added.

Scraping Shadows

Manipulated acoustic guitar to create ambient textures, with melodic elements

Never Let Me Go

Sound Design, Composition, Songwriting. Yorkshire, UK

Allan Stelmach