russ garcia & his orchestra: fantastica

A 1950s exotica classic that stylistically defines the genre "space age pop." The era of manned space travel began in 1959, but in musical terms, composers had been exploring interplanetary vistas for centuries. Russ Garcia's accomplishment was to merge compositional sophistication and the technology of the modern transistorized recording studio with cleverly created special effects. From the first track of 1958's Fantastica, "Into Space," Garcia sets the controls of interstellar overdrive and never looks back. His pan-galactic portraits shuttle the listener from planet to planet, as moods shift from mysterious to exhilarating. In Garcia's own words, "... it was one of the first science-fiction record albums. We had no computers to make effects, so I recorded a musical saw struck with a soft mallet; blew a straw into gelatin water; vibrated a kitchen off the edge of a table; tapped woods blocks; hit a long while moving a microphone from the center to the edge. I recorded these sounds at different speeds, some of them backwards through feedback echo. Then I wrote them into the orchestral score."