Image: ‘Darkside of the Cone‘ screened at IKLECTIK by Jason Brooks

As YouTube wormholes go, A Moon Age Daydream is possibly one of the more refined playlists on the platform. Curated by London artist and researcher Jason Brooks, the list charts the cultural connections between transportation, time and music from 1850 to the present. Scroll down its 500 plus tracks and you’ll find yourself stumbling across Captain Beefheart’s “Yellow Brick Road”, hitching a ride on John Coltrane’s “Blue Train” and flying high with Bridget St John. Less obvious examples include The Fall’s “Totally Wired”. Rather than physical transportation, the track explores the hyperactive change in perception experienced by someone on caffeine and uppers.

The project was inspired by David Bowie’s Ziggy-era, which mirrored the cultural obsession with propulsion and space travel prevalent at the time. The playlist formed in 2019 when Brooks was working for the UK’s Department of Transport. When it was marking the centenary of its formation, Brooks decided to investigate how much music had been influenced by various modes of transportation during its timespan. Soon after, the playlist expanded its scope, going further back to the beginnings of recorded sound and the development of combustion engines, before arriving at the cut off point of 1850 – the nascent days of the petroleum industry.

One surprise he came across in his research was the very first recording of Harry Dacre’s 1892 song “Daisy Bell”, about the then new bicycle craze. “The interesting aspect of this song was its reappearance as the first song made by a computer in the 1950s,” Brooks explains. “It was then famously used in 2001: A Space Odyssey as Hal the computer slowly dies.” The playlist’s sister Instagram account adds further context to tracks. For example, Tomorrow’s “My White Bicycle” is matched with the story of Amsterdam’s Witte Fietsenplan, Luud Schimmelpennink’s 1960s initiative concerning bike sharing.

The playlist took five years to complete and echoes the notion of evolutionary voyage suggested in Stanley Kubrick’s intergalactic odyssey by concluding with “The Big Ship” by Brian Eno. We are, after all, riding an enormous living vessel hurtling through time and space. “Rarely is the music about the mode itself,” Brooks reflects. “It’s a medium for a destination towards or away from the self, someplace, or someone.” ● youtube.com/@a.moonagedaydream

Ilia Rogatchevski
Originally published by The Wire, June 2024