19 April was Record Store Day 2014. To mark the occasion, I went down to Canterbury Records in Pasadena and got really lucky.

In my aimless wanderings about the aisles, I found this:

It’s a record titled The Space Project, and it’s absolutely gorgeous music. But the coolest part is the origin of the sounds contained therein.

The contributing musicians (Youth Lagoon, Spiritualized, Porcelain Raft, The Antlers, etc.) have taken electromagnetic data recorded by the two Voyager probes, frequency-shifted them into the audible range, and turned them into music. The tracks are grouped together based on where the original data were recorded (you’ll hear sounds from Jupiter, Io, Saturn, Miranda, etc.).

When I first saw the record at the bottom of a cardboard box, the cover caught my eye. Then the title piqued my interested. And as I started to read the blurb at the back (“The audio tracks that form the raw material for Space Project were recorded by the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes that NASA launched in 1977…”), I became visibly anxious to buy the damn thing and listen to it (which I did for the remainder of the day).

Given that 1) I was not aware of this record and therefore 2) not looking for it, and 3) arrived at Canterbury Records much too late in the afternoon, the likelihood of me finding this record was hovering barely above zero. I think I may have bought the last copy they had. So next time I’m running low on luck, I’ll know I’d spent it all getting this beautiful record.