Whilst surfing the Interwebs, I came across a video of planetary recordings, or the ambient noise heard around the presence of a planet. I gave it a listen and came to one simple conclusion- NASA has discovered space truly writes better ambient music than us humans. Not just ambient in the post-rock sense either! There's some black metal throw in there, some spacey synths and even a little industrial. Here's the video for reference…
Ready for the interpretations?
- Jupiter is kind of like the end of a ridiculously long song, or maybe even the middle section of of an ambient metal song… or Fallujah's "Silent" with extra reverb.
- Miranda is similar to Jupiter. Bored.
- Neptune is a Sunn O))) song as heard through a blanket and I refuse to believe otherwise. I'm not even sure this one is space noise, honestly. I'm pretty positive NASA was like "nobody will know" and just turned on Black One.
- Rings of Uranus has this weird modulating minor second thing going on that litters the djent scene, like I should be hearing some Meshuggah-esque rhythm underneath it but nothing ever happens. Worst djent song ever?
- Saturn is what you get when you take an old Nine Inch Nails song and strip away the instruments. Who said background noise isn't useful in music? That's industrial, baby! Saturn all the way!
- Saturn's Rings is the pulsating, like the prelude to something stupid heavy. No word on if Rings of Saturn heard this noise and had the same idea… I mean, the video is from 2010.
- Remember like, five sentences ago, when I said Neptune is a Sunn O))) song? Well as it turns out, NASA are time travelers as well! They've traveled to 2014, taken Wolves In the Throne Room's new album Celestite, played it into a microphone and then said it was Neptune's space noise. I am on to you NASA.
- Sphere of Io is what happens when black metal decides there needs to be more reverb instead of less reverb and tries to out trve the trvest of trve. Skip to around 4:54 in that video. If there were lyrics flashed across the screen in sync with that off, ghost-sounding voice noise in there, I bet some people would really buy into the fact this was a really ambient jam with ludicrously distant vocals.
- Who knew Uranus was a giant guitar flanger pedal? I didn't. If this broke into the riff after the intro for "Hot to Teacher" by Van Halen or "Live Wire" by Motley Crue, I wouldn't even be fazed. There's just something inherently guitar metal about that sound.
If you're asking why we left out the Earth noises, it's because those are actual noise-based compositions written for this video and are not space noise recorded by NASA. It's also worth noting these noises are public domain on NASA's website, so if I've given you an excellent idea for your ambient black metal triple album dealing with the nature of humanity, feel free to snag them!
