PART I: THE SOUND OF SPACE

As always, he felt himself moved by the eerie but strangely serene spectacle of the ghostly convoy endlessly circling the dark sea of the midnight sky, the long-dead astronauts converging for the ten-thousandth time upon their brief rendezvous and then setting off on their lonely flight-paths around the perimeter of the ionosphere, the tidal edge of the beachway into space which had reclaimed them.
J.G. Ballard, The Cage of Sand

On July fourteen 1975 Apollo and Soyuz spaceships connected for the first time, symbolically ending the space-race that started only eighteen years before, with the launch of Sputnik 1. At the time of their rendezvous both ships floated 225 km above Amsterdam, the same city that 20 years later, functions as the base of a magnificently strange and beautiful popgroup named after the Russian ship that started it all. Sputnik's first CD Favorite Songs of the Soviet Cosmonauts has just been released to the world, outside the normal distribution network of recordlabels, which may actually have been a wise move. Untouched by uncomprehending market-forces or the dour efficiency of the current Dutch music-press, this CD can be treasured as a shiny, secret object uncorrupted by dark forces, a gift to the listener who is seduced into their fantastical world. This couldn't be any other way. Sputnik's all-embracing naivete would be shattered if it were to be forced into the real world, evaporating like a pleasant dream.