Brian Eno & Daniel Lanois - An Ending Ascent

The music we know as Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks- likely the gold standard for so-called ambient music- began as music for a single film Apollo later retitled For All Mankind.  The music was intended as a soundtrack for a movie composed of 35 mm footage of the Apollo moon missions.  But the 'art film' never materialized satisfactorily.  The music has since been used in countless contexts including the films 28 Days, Trainspotting and Traffic.

Much of what makes the album so distinct is the creative collaboration between Brian Eno and Canada's Daniel Lanois for the second time in Lanois and his brothers studio in Hamilton (at Grant Avenue Studio in a converted Edwardian house).  The studio itself was a venture between the Lanois brothers and Bob Doidge.   It was as Lanois puts it a great place for 'creators' and Eno took both to Lanois and the space.  With the compliment of some specific equipment Eno requested, like a Yamaha Omnichord, and the serendipity of Lanois' unschooled and beautiful playing on the lap steel- the two made sweet music together here and for years to come.

Eno, who was an Art school ponce, enjoyed Lanois' lack of formal education as it were.  I'm sure there were some ventures in creative chemistry that contributed to their overall fondness for one another and the sounds they produced as well.  Eno is known for employing elaborate concepts to deploy in his music (such as on Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, a stylized take on a Peking opera based on a set of postcards).  In the case of Apollo he was drawn to the notion of wanting to avoid the melodramoatic and uptempo way he felt the landing had been presented in the media.

In the liner notes, Eno relates that when he watched the Apollo 11 landing in 1969 he felt that the strangeness of that event was compromised by the low quality of the television transmission and an excess of journalistic discussion, and that he wished to avoid the melodramatic and uptempo way it was presented. That philosophy dominated when For All Mankind ("Apollo") was originally released as a non-narrative collection of NASA stock footage from the Apollo program.