This is the track list for The Expanding Universe, a mixtape made for Jay Thompson on January 30, 2023. It is the seventh mixtape in the 42/40 Explorer Series Box Set.
Side A:
Markus Stockhausen & Jasper Van’t Hof, Daybreak — from the album Aqua Sansa (1980)
Laurie Spiegel, The Expanding Universe — from the album The Expanding Universe (1980)
Don Slepian, Geodesic — from the album New Dawn (1980)
Side B:
Lol Coxhill & Morgan Fischer, Slow Music — from the album Slow Music (1980)
Roland P. Young, Row Land — from the album Isophonic Boogie Woogie (1980)
Kevin Braheny, After I Said “Goodnight” — from the album Lullaby for the Hearts of Space (1980)
When I was a child, I lived with my family in a small house in unincorporated Snohomish County in Washington. Our family had limited means, and I have no doubt that life was neither simple nor easy for my parents, who were raising four children under the age of five and were both later-in-life college students who studied in universities up until I was a teenager. My parents each had collections of records and tapes from when they were non-parenting youths, but my suspicion is that they didn’t often add to those collections in the 1980s, the time period of my childhood.
They did, however, listen to radio programs. One radio program in particular was broadcast on a station called KEZX, 98.9 on the FM dial in the Seattle area, a station seemingly devoted to genres like modern composition, smooth jazz, new age, and other oddities of the era. The program was called Musical Starstreams, and it was syndicated from San Francisco. It was, in all likelihood, the earliest regular radio program devoted to electronic music.
I remember the show as a vague shimmery eeriness that would emerge in the living room from time to time. It wasn’t classical music, but it moved at about the same pace. It didn’t sound like anything else that anybody listened to, either. It’s there in a corner of my sensorium, playing on and on, never quite identified or replicated.
A few years ago, I got curious about that weird sound and sorted around in my memory for places it might have come from. It came from here. The reason I got curious and found that archive is that I was listening to as much music as I could from 1980 and some of it evoked that vague shimmery eeriness in my sensorium pretty directly. Turns out, the creators of Musical Starstreams got interested in that sound right around 1980 and thought something new was going on (which in retrospect was clearly true).
While I was making this box set, I was still running a radio show on my campus radio station. I played this mixtape, which was meant to draw back some of the sounds of Musical Starstreams, and my parents listened to it (thanks, Mom; thanks, Dad). Afterwards, my Dad brought me a stack of cassette tapes he’d been keeping with him up in Alaska. Here they are:
Those are actual working cassette tapes from the 1980s. My Dad recorded them direct from the radio and kept them all these years — he claims to have listened to some of them so frequently that he can recall when the sound of my little brother Nick crying comes in during particular songs (cause apparently he recorded them with a non-wired cassette player? I’m not really sure).
So this mixtape may be long and slow, too much so for almost anyone to listen to I’m sure — but it’s also an important part of my family heritage.
And those cassette tapes — I assume those are my inheritance.
Share this post