People keep asking when the idea started. Like there was a moment. There’s always a moment, technically, but mine happened somewhere between a Tuesday and 2003, and I’ve stopped trying to pin it closer than that. What I remember clearly is being annoyed. Someone on a livestream called a completely digital set “spinning.” No records anywhere near the booth. Just a laptop and confidence. That bothered me for what might have been an evening or might have been several years, and at some point the annoyance turned into a thought, which was: fine. I’ll show you spinning. I’ll do it somewhere the word actually applies. Somewhere there’s no up.
That’s the whole concept. People want more than that and there isn’t more than that.
The patch was the first thing anyone saw. Me, floating over a record the size of a small moon, kept quiet for months before it dropped. I never met whoever designed it. Heard they sat with it a long time, which tracks — you don’t get a wing angle that close to right by accident. Not fully right, for the record. Little too steep on the left one. Nobody asked me before it went to print, which, fine, but I noticed.
A few days after that came the animated poster, and that’s when people saw Anna Raduga’s name for the first time, listed where it actually belonged — one of the scheduled astronauts on the mission. What the poster didn’t spell out, and what most people didn’t know yet, is that she’d been a DJ before she was an astronaut, and she had her own set worked into the schedule up there. Controller and laptop, not vinyl. A different argument entirely, one I’m not picking today. Same lack of gravity to deal with either way. First time I actually met her was a training room, fluorescent lighting, someone explaining checklist procedures. Felt like the fortieth time. That happens with certain people. You skip the part where you’re supposed to be strangers.
Then the statement went out with the photo, and I meant every word of it at the time. Something about gravity being optional and the music not being. I still believe that sentence. Turned out the turntables had their own opinions about what counted as optional, and those opinions arrived later, but the statement itself holds up. I’m not walking it back. I’m just adding an asterisk the size of a space station.
The launch I remember in pieces, and the pieces aren’t the ones you’d expect. Not the g-force, not the noise, though there was plenty of both. What stuck was a smell — something like hot electronics and orange juice — and a specific click the hatch made on docking that I still think about sometimes. Zero gravity itself, first real few minutes of it, was less dramatic than advertised. You stop knowing which way is down and your body just agrees to that immediately. No fight in it. The fight came later, and the fight was entirely the records’ fault.
Here’s what actually happened at showtime. Vinyl doesn’t understand microgravity and it never will. A record wants a surface and a weight holding it there, and up on the ISS there’s no weight to speak of, so the moment I let go of anything, it left. Not dramatically. Just calmly drifted off like it had somewhere else to be. Same with the turntables eventually, same with the mixer — the mounting we’d built held for exactly as long as nobody touched it with any enthusiasm, and I touch things with enthusiasm. That’s the job. We had maybe two real rehearsal windows up there before the show, both too short, both spent solving problems that turned out not to be the actual problems. Should’ve spent less time worrying about the needle and all the time worrying about basic physics. In hindsight it’s obvious. Everything’s obvious in hindsight. That’s what hindsight is for.
The label put out a statement the next day that read a lot calmer than the actual mood on board. Up there it wasn’t disappointment so much as everyone quietly recalculating what the rest of the week looked like while a mixer drifted past a window. Dave’s version of events downplays the part where I chased a crossfader down a corridor. I don’t hold that against him. Someone has to be the calm one and it was never going to be me.
Got some good photos out of it anyway. The warm-up shot’s the one people keep sending me, and it’s mine too — everything still looked possible in that one, right before it wasn’t. Overall it was a good trip. Genuinely. You don’t get many chances to be annoyed by something as complete as vinyl and physics disagreeing with each other four hundred kilometers up.
Would I do it again. Yeah.
Mark the Winged Lion