[MUSIC] "Reissue of the Voyager Golden Record Will Be the Greatest Album in the Universe"

[rfmcdonald]

Wired's Megan Molteni reports on a fantastic new album release. I would love to own a copy.

Carl Sagan’s Voyager Golden Record may be the most limited release album of all time. It’s certainly the most well-traveled. The iconic record, which NASA developed to represent humankind to alien civilizations, was printed onto gold-plated copper and launched into space aboard Voyager 1 back in 1977. Today, it’s nearly 13 billion miles away from Earth. A second record is on a similar trajectory aboard Voyager 2. There are ten more on display at various NASA institutions. But that’s it. Apparently, even Sagan, who chaired the committee that created the record, couldn’t get a copy. The record was never made available to the general public.

Until now, thanks to a Kickstarter-funded reissue of the historic album. In a stunning recreation of the original, David Pescovitz, a research director at Institute for the Future and co-editor of Boing Boing, teamed up with Timothy Daly, a manager at Amoeba Music in San Francisco, and Lawrence Azerrad, a graphic designer who has created album packages for Wilco, Miles Davis, and Sting to produce a 40th Anniversary edition vinyl box set of the Voyager Golden Record.

“It’s the ultimate album package of the ultimate album packaging,” Pescovitz says. “The awesome intersection of science and art and design that’s meant to instill a sense of wonder and spark the imagination.”

Pescovitz’s grad school advisor, science writer Timothy Ferris, produced the original Golden Record, and will be in the recording studio for the remastering. To get ready for that, Pescovitz has been tracking down licensing and obtaining the rights to all the original audio, which includes everything from Bach to Chuck Berry, a Navajo Night chant to whale vocalizations, and greetings in 55 languages.