Project Moonbase – The Historic Sound of the Future | Unusual music show | Podcast | Space cult | projectmoonbase.com

By far our most popular episode to date is PMB128: Now That's What I Don't Call the 80s. We have no idea why this might be but in an attempt to re-create the huge success of that show, we thought it time to collect together another selection of music which sounds as though it could have been recorded 30 years ago. To that end, we bring you new/old releases from Oxykitten, Rich Menga, Hunter Complex, mitch murder and Norm Chambers. We do also have some music actually recorded in the 1980s but we hope the strong legal defence mounted in the course of this week's show justifying their inclusion proves convincing in the court of public opinion.

Inspired by what is supposedly (and inexplicably) the highest-grossing animation film ever made, we bring you a show themed around Disney's Frozen, including several improvements on tracks featured in that film as well some other ice-themed tunes which we feel should really have been part of the film.

This week on the show, dear listener, we bring you some recent releases and arrivals at the Moonbase which have been graded APPROPRIATE by our rigorous scoring algorithms. We have another track from the extremely wobbly new album from The Meridian Brothers, some brand new 80s spookiness from Holland, a medicinal track from concretism, Theremin Hero playing his NESKeytar, music from one of our highly talented listeners Keith Seatman, the return of show favourite Caravan by means of the Lebanon and Munich, a rare return to an album we'd previously vacuum-sealed and consigned to the archive and we close the show with a quite extraordinary piece of alternate history courtesy of James Last.

We're not afraid to visit the same very specific topic twice, dear listener, so having marked the 50th anniversary of the formation of The Rolling Stones back in PMB074, on this week's show we mark the 50th anniversary of the release of their eponymous debut album. We've chosen to do this by attempting a track-for-track cover of (most of) the tracks on the original album through the various media of lounge music, minimal synth, Galician punk and ukulele to name but a few.

It's all zilla and no filla on this week's show as we celebrate both the centenary of Japanese musical maestro Akira Ifukube, who wrote most of the music for Toho Studio's series of Godzilla movies, and 'reboot' this year of the Godillza franchise. Most of the music you'll hear comes from one of the classic Godzilla movies but we do also have a few tributes to the great lizard by other musicians.

Without wishing to disappoint our geologist listeners, this week's show is not actually a show all about continental drift but is instead a musical miscellany of some choice new releases and reissues which have come our way in the last couple of weeks. We kick off with a track mentioned on last week's show, a lovely chiptune treatment of a France Gall hit. We also have a track from the latest release on Ghost Box, a track from our favourite female Japanese quartet of (mostly) non-musicians, some under-the-cushion sounds played on a Casio CZ-5000 and the return of show favourite Caravan, this time played on a lap steel guitar - and that's just the crust.

This week we return to a news story we covered recently in which mathematician Alex Bellos sought to find out why people have a favourite number and what in fact the most popular numbers around the world are. So in true Pick of the Pops style we bring you the world's top ten favourite numbers, through the medium of chiptune, erotic Italian soundtrack music, library music and cha cha. We also invite you to play Moon Bingo along with the show this week, using the cover art for the show to mark off each number as it comes up, perhaps downing a glass of port each time you find one. The first listener to call "house" will also win a prize, but only if you manage to get your entry to us here at the Moonbase in a sealed envelope.

You are going to relax, so begin by making yourself perfectly comfortable. Sit down in your favourite chair. Or lie down on your favourite couch or bed. Drop your arms to your sides and gaze intently at a spot high above your head at an approximate angle of 45 degrees. This week on Project Moonbase we explore the world of dreams, trances and astral travelling with the intention that by the end of the experiment, sorry, show you will have reached an altogether higher state of consciousness and be able to look down upon yourself looking up at yourself.

Things go all electro-mechanical on this week's show dear listener with music made by dot matrix printers, floppy disk drives, a jazzolian, an enormous music box, a player piano a polyphon, an orchestrion and a trio of robots to mention but a few. We also have a track from a great new compilation of electronic library music from the Standard library music label, lovingly curated by Public Information records.

DJ Bongoboy recently fled the lunar base and ended up spending a few days in London with Space Disco Jeff and came away with a couple of space disco gems which you'll hear on this week's show. There are also tracks by bands we saw live namely Laetitia Sadier's new trio and Norwegian baroque popster Alexander von Mehren who was in town to provide musical support for the High Llamas. We kick the show off with a track from the terrific new EP by friends of the show, Spaceheads, and we also feature a brace of KPM 1000 series library music LPs which have been "updated" by Shawn Lee and Tim Love Lee. The results are rather special.

When we were searching through the enormous Moonbase archive recently, we were shocked to discover that we'd not previously covered one of the most important topics to us, namely that of tea. So rather belatedly, here is our celebration of that great leafy infusion. As we note during the podcast, if you happen to be listening to the show around 4pm, do please make sure that you press the pause button and go and make yourself a nice strong brew.

Time to catch up with some new releases and recent arrivals at the Moonbase. We have some Bombay Disco, some 70s Italian soundtrack, instrumental audio logos and some music to do some East German floor exercises to.

In an unusually timely edition of the show (don't worry, dear listener, it won't happen again), we bring you a selection of our favourite egg-related tunes from quite literally around the world. There are songs from France, Arabia, Spain, China, South Korea and practically everywhere else.

Following on from last week's less-than-serious titter-fest, An Ill Wind, this week on the show we take a much more meteorological and geographical approach for the second half of our wind double album. You'll hear tracks about some of our favourite winds from around the world, including the Mistral, the Sirocco, the Papagayo and the Föhn.

For the first time on Project Moonbase, we bring you the first part of a conceptual double album, the concept being wind. This arose largely because of two differing approaches taken by DJ Bongoboy and MC Zirconium to the subject, with the former taking a somewhat "Carry On" approach and the latter a more academic one. The end result was so many great pieces of music that we decided to split them across two shows. So for this first part we bring you a hopefully chuckle and titter inducing selection of tunes, mostly from the more innocent 60s, where the topic of wind had less of a double entendre than it perhaps does now. On next week's show we'll be taking a more meteorological and geographical approach to the four winds.