today, November 24th, 2020, marks the 51st anniversary of the final landing of the Apollo 12 space mission. it also is my first anniversary of creating an album commemorating that mission.
i personally find this to be the best thing i’ve ever made musically, as it represents a total and complete thought that i executed to my best ability (at the time). i made this album shortly after getting my first synthesizer last year, an OP-1. when i first got the OP-1 i would make tunes every morning by sampling bits from NPR stations via its radio. one morning i heard this NPR story about the Apollo 12 mission that inspired me to make this album - a complete soundtrack of the entire Apollo 12 mission, which i made entirely on the OP-1 (my only instrument…at the time 
).
NASA has (almost) all of the recordings for the Apollo 12 mission online. i had some very tedious work to do for my job and i ended up finding a lot of solace in just listening to hours of the raw NASA audio to fill the tedium. there are some really funny and interesting sections. for this album i picked out the most emblematic moments and made songs around them and ordered them chronologically so you can get a sense of the Apollo 12 mission from start to end. in general, the mission encapsulated a lot of joy (singing on the moon! throwing rocks on the moon!), a lot of scares (getting hit by lightning during takeoff!) and a lot of tedium (fixing a generator that kept getting dust on it!).
looking back i still love this album and listen to it almost every week. i’ve never shared it here and thought maybe someone else might enjoy it too.
