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February 2024 sees Ghost Funk Orchestra blast off into new territory on their fifth album, A Trip To The Moon. In just over a minute, Opening, the aptly titled first track, encapsulates a sense of what's to come for those along for the adventure. Sci-fi synth waves build into the sophisticated sounds that saturated radios and hifi sets as the space race mounted in the late 1960s, culminating in a big band brass arrangement which catapults GFO into a new sonic era. The dramatic scene is set by Megan Mancini's vocals on Eyes of Love as the story of a landlocked lover whose heart is held hostage by a cosmonaut ready for take off into uncharted territory unfolds. Seth Applebaum, Ghost Funk Orchestra's commander in chief who composes, produces and arranges the music in his upstate New York subterranean lab, has always had a latent fascination with space and space travel. Midway through penning the instrumentals which would become the backdrop of GFO's fifth album, he became aware that Internet Archive had made the sound footage of those Apollo to Mission Control transmissions accessible in the public domain, which, once he started listening, gave him the idea of using that narrative as a binder for the music which was coming to life. The process became painstaking - the footage was filled with long silences, punctuated by surprisingly casual commentary on the cosmos. Applebaum's commitment to the voyage drew him into a kind of historical tourism in which he studied film, photos and music from the era. He was struck by the gusto with which new technology was embraced in pop culture of the day, and honored that tradition in the creation of A Trip To The Moon, skilfully using a blend of digital recording techniques to cobble together orchestrations incorporating 60s & 70s analog keyboards and the guitar sounds reminiscent of early surf bands from the 50s and 60s. We also hear
