Science Fiction, Lounge Music, and Mid-Century Domestic Utopia

This is the introduction to a paper I presented at the American Musicological Society Annual Conference in 2015 (Louisville, KY)

Album cover of Russ Garcia’s Fantastica: Music from Outer Space (1959)

Russ Garcia’s 1959 album, Fantastica: Music From Outer Space, opens with the track “Into Space.” As was the fashion for space lounge records of the time, it begins with a countdown featuring a heavily-reverbed male voice. The sound of a rocket blasts and then fades as electronic shimmers fade in—the kind of sound effect that in radio dramas, film, and television came to represent journeys into new dimensions of time and space. Then a languid flute melody materializes out of the sonic distance accompanied by a harp, bells, and a gradually emerging orchestra. An oboe takes over the melody and a rhythm section enters, first just the low pulse of a string bass, then a vibraphone and the sweep of a brushed snare. As if we might forget that this familiar sound of orchestral lounge jazz was meant to illustrate a trip into outer space, a slowly ascending sine wave enters, suggestive of ascent into the cosmos.

In florid prose, the liner notes capture the transportive function of this pictorial music, describing each track as a separate adventure within a series. The track we just heard is described as follows: “We are catapulted into the atmosphere—surrounded by the deafening roar of rockets which fade into nothingness, and are enveloped by the silence of space and swallowed into a nebulous mist of weightlessness…floating far Into Space.”[1] A successful composer, conductor, and arranger for film and radio, with experience working for NBC radio and a fifteen-year stint at Universal Pictures, Garcia was likely thinking both cinematically and commercially.[2] Each of the short tracks (most are between two and four minutes long) is whimsically named after an imaginary cosmic feature or alien race like “Volcanoes of Mercury,” “Monsters of Jupiter,” or “Water Creatures of Astra,” and stylistically features a quirky combination of West Coast jazz, classical, modern and cartoon-like orchestral themes, electronic sound effects, and lounge exotica. Not surprisingly, Garcia professed to having been inspired by Disneyland’s Tomorrowland. Indeed, the experience of listening to the album is not unlike that of floating on a man-made river through a theme-park tunnel featuring islands of animatronic space-age attractions.

Two years prior, Garcia had released the slightly less sonically adventurous Sounds in the Night, a highly-acclaimed vocal jazz album ostensibly geared more towards domestic space than outer space. In it, Garcia arranged both original works and jazz standards like “Sophisticated Lady” and “When Your Lover Has Gone” for orchestra and vocal ensemble featuring Hollywood dubbing artist, Marni Nixon on wordless soprano vocalise.

Album cover of Russ Garcia’s, Sounds in the Night (1957)

Suitable as cocktail-party background music, Sounds in the Night was likely the kind of sound Dave Kapp of Kapp Records had in mind when he offered Garcia the opportunity to record an album of his choice. But when Garcia sent him several of the resulting tracks (which would become Fantastica), Kapp was put off by its adventurous bent. As a result, Garcia had to take his album to Liberty Records, which, having released a series of highly successful exotica albums with Martin Denny since 1957 saw popular potential in Fantastica’s colorful sound.[3] Indeed, it became a top seller for Liberty Records.

Despite their ostensibly different feel, my paper argues that these two albums occupy a shared space in a narrative of post-war American popular music, connecting the space of the home, with outer space. Investigating interrelations of science and culture in late 1950s mass media, I consider how these two space lounge albums exemplify a form of utopian expression that functioned within a feedback loop between entertainment, science, and the socio-political climate, ultimately contributing to an everyday experience of lived science fiction.

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Contact me for a copy of the full paper!

[1]  Ashley Warren in the Digital Booklet for Fantastica: Music from Outer Space, re-released in 2009.

[2] Notably, following the release of Fantastica, Garcia was invited by director, George Pal to score The Time Machine, released in 1960.

[3] Information taken from the Fantastica liner notes, written by Ashley Warren.