Two Million Miles to Earth

There’s a New York Times headline that says “You Won’t Stop Thinking About This Clam Chowder,” which sounds like a fucking curse.

But I'm still thinking about reverb. Last night, it struck me that reverb is my Tannhäuser Gate, both there and not there, a threshold between the zones of shape and fog, definition and possibility. Sort of like my brain during the first hour of the day.

Here’s the routine: Wake up. Check the weather. Check the latest polls. Make some coffee. Check the latest polls. The other day, C. asked, “Did you see the news?” and I held my breath, bracing for scenes from another disaster, the latest inhuman act. She could tell me everyone in Nebraska disappeared last night. She could tell me anything, and I would believe it, for these are days of suspended disbelief.

I often think about Douglas Coupland’s confession that “around 2010 my own brain started feeling truly different. I realised that I was never going to go back to my old, pre-internet brain: I’d been completely rewired. Ten years later I don’t even remember what my pre-internet brain felt like.”

Coupland takes comfort in the idea that we’re in this together, that we’ve all been “neurally homogenised,” but this idea horrifies me on an elemental level, as if my soul is on the line. Sometimes it feels like an ultimatum: embrace a pixellated future without complaint or grieve for the textures of the past. Perhaps the only solution is a cognitive leap similar to how the Constructivists and Futurists plunged into the future a century ago, determined to fuse with the machine. Embrace speed. Groove on distraction. Let my thoughts get garbled and strange. Find god in the liquid crystal glow.

Until then, one of my favorite songs for concentration is Richard Hawtin & Pete Namlook’s “A Million Miles to Earth", an ambient classic that turned thirty years old this year. It’s an epic of sweeping chords with a very 1990s synthesizer pitched to a particular flavor of pre-millennium optimism—faith that technology would improve us, that history had ended, and global harmony was around the corner.

Last week, I slowed it down to sludge and tended to it while I worked on other things, occasionally adding a dash of Ronettes here, a pinch of Elvis Presley there. I couldn’t decide whether I preferred it 57% or 89% slower, so I smushed both versions together, stripped out the treacly piano bits, and installed some passages of static and reverb. Now it sounds like wave upon wave of a slowly freezing sea, and it has become a reliable companion for hour-long bouts of writing and pixel-pushing.

Richie Hawtin & Pete Namlook - A Million Miles to Earth
(57%—89% slower)
(From Within | Plus 8, 1994)
Radio static, reverb, highway traffic, and fragments of Skeeter Davis, Elvis Presley, Mojave 3, Tommy James & the Shondells, Everly Brothers, Paris Sisters, The Zombies, Righteous Brothers, Lee Hazlewood, and Patsy Cline.

Listen below, or better yet, here’s an mp3. If you’d like to hear the original version, here’s a Spotify link and a nifty video on YouTube.

If you have two more minutes to kill, please help me identify this wonderful song and/or the language it’s in.

Thank you for taking the time to listen. The request lines are open.