Cosmic Cassette
Released: July 30, 2025
Total runtime: 40:00
Inspired by the Voyager Record, this issue of bitpunk.fm is a cosmic mixtape. Well, each issue of bitpunk.fm is a mixtape but this one especially so.
It opens the same the way the Voyager record does, with the Secretary General greeting. You should look up Kurt Waldheim’s history by the way, it’s interesting. Then the only portion of the tape where I speak, I attempt to explain the history of the record and reflect on storage mediums. In the middle is my poem, From Dust to Digital.
The rest of Side A is a mix of sounds and music from the Voyager Record. I was impressed they mixed the whale songs with the UN greetings. I chose some music from the record to play in between the Sounds of Earth sound essay.
In Carl Sagan’s book Murmurs of Earth he mentioned that while researching sound he came across what he thought was the first field recording ever made, which was of British Soldier’s launching gas canisters during WWI. This recording I’ve found might be what he heard but it was later thought to be manufactured. In any case, I mixed it in where Carl was too optimistic of humanity to include it.
Lastly, Side A concludes with image transmissions. The first is a circle as to calibrate your receiver function.
Side B is a sonomontage of Carl Sagan from Cosmos and a Johnny Carson interview. Then we have The View, which is a passage from Paul Rosenberg’s Breaking Dawn, created by the Ohm. I split the left and right stereo channels so you hear the English and the Slovak at the same time.
The Doerfel’s track Think from their Think EP is next and it’s just a fun spacey song.
Following that, I mixed Gustav Holst’s Mars, played by the U.S. Marine Corp Band with Carl Sagan’s statements on nuclear weapons. This slides right into the movie Contact, which is nerd-famous for its radio astronomy scene.
And that is exactly what the last piece is about. We get to listen to some Pulsars.