Space Walk

Lemon Jelly built their music from samples and memory and a very specific British warmth that has no equivalent elsewhere, and "Space Walk" is perhaps their most complete statement of what that combination could produce. The track samples NASA recordings from actual space missions, and the voices of astronauts — calm, crackling, matter-of-fact about the extraordinary — float through a production that is lush with analog keyboard tones, bass guitar that hums rather than punches, and percussion that sounds like it was found in a garden shed and recorded on a pleasant afternoon. The effect is deeply nostalgic without being sad about it: a kind of radiant uncomplicated joy in the fact that humans once floated outside their own planet and reported back in bureaucratic language about the view. Fred Deakin and Nick Franglen's genius on this track is in the contrast between the cosmic subject matter and the domestic warmth of the production — this is a song about outer space that makes you feel like you're lying on a warm carpet in 1972. It belongs to a particularly English strain of psychedelia that reaches through Broadcast and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop toward something fundamentally optimistic about the human capacity for wonder. Play it on a Sunday morning with strong coffee and whatever light is coming through your windows. It asks nothing of you except that you be present for it.