Roxy Music
A minimalist, almost mantra-like meditation on relational distance, where Bryan Ferry reduces a whole failing romance to a…
emotional distance relationship drift repetition as anxiety
David Bowie
A dramatized radio transmission between mission control and an astronaut becomes an extended metaphor for detachment and…
isolation fame and alienation dissociation
Aphex Twin
An untitled, numbered ambient piece from Aphex Twin's largely wordless second Selected Ambient Works volume, this track works…
dissociation interior space repetition and stasis
Brian Eno
Deep Blue Day is a slow, pedal-steel-laced instrumental from Eno's soundtrack to a documentary about the Apollo moon missions.…
weightlessness nostalgia Americana in space
Air
An eight-minute instrumental that opens Air's debut album, built on a hypnotic bassline, layered analog keyboards, and a…
retro-futurism seduction and mystery nocturnal drift
An instrumental ambient piece built from slowly rising synthesizer chords and a wordless choral pad, composed for a documentary…
space and vastness transcendence mourning and elevation
Elvis Costello
This is Costello's recording of a song originally written by Charles Aznavour, best known in English through Herbert Kretzmer's…
the elusiveness of the beloved identity as multiplicity devotion despite uncertainty
Frank Sinatra
A love song that uses cosmic imagery as an elaborate courtship metaphor, translating grand celestial longing into the plainest…
romantic devotion longing and desire the vastness of space as metaphor for feeling
Harry Nilsson
A song about tuning out the noise of other people in favor of an interior fantasy of motion and escape. Written by Fred Neil and…
alienation escape/wanderlust isolation amid crowds
Röyksopp
A minimal, incantatory portrait of a woman weighed down by unnamed distress, sung by an observer who circles her without ever…
mental distress observation vs intimacy compulsive repetition
Elton John
A spaceman narrates the mundane dread of leaving home for another routine off-world shift, and finds the glamour of space travel…
alienation the gap between public and private self domestic loss
Magazine
A song about psychic exposure and depletion, built around a single, obsessively repeated image of light being expelled from a…
self-exposure alienation bodily/psychic collapse
Television
This is Television's first single, a hazy character sketch built on a shuffling, unresolved guitar figure rather than a…
outsider mystique visionary madness voyeurism and judgment
Yes
Starship Trooper is a three-part suite that moves from an invocation of natural, cosmic imagery into a meditation on inherited…
transcendence the limits of language/knowledge nature as cosmic messenger