The Avalanches on sending music to the Moon: “We’ve always been really fascinated by that”

nme.com:

The Avalanches have contributed to a project that involves sending exclusive transmissions to the Moon and back as part of the UK-wide Tour de Moon festival.The immersive and free festival – which brings together talks, cinema, music and games under one cosmic theme – has toured the UK throughout May and June via sustainable moon convoy, and is due to conclude at Hackney’s Pedro Youth Club on Thursday (June 16).As part of the festival, creative director Dr.

Nelly Ben Hayoun, who is also the founder of NASA’s International Space Orchestra, has collaborated with artists including The Avalanches, Massive Attack, Moses Boyd and Pussy Riot using Moonbounce: an Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) technology.“Radio waves are beamed from the Earth to the Moon, and they basically eat the surface of the entire side of the Moon facing the Earth,” Hayoun said of the technology. “And that penetrates three metres deep into the surface before eventually being reflected and refracted by the deeper lunar rocks.

And that’s a very unique way, if you’re a musician, to think about collaborating with the Moon, because effectively, the sound that you’re going to send to the Moon is going to come back to us completely distorted.“That’s what really excited me about Moonbounce.

At Tour de Moon, our festival is about new relationships to our environment, new relationships to humans and societies and looking at alternative futures.