Tonio Sagan

Massachusetts producer Tonio Sagan returns with another incredible installment to his “Voyager Records” series, this time drifting even deeper into outer space on the haunting “Stranger Than Fiction.” The nearly five-minute track is a hypnotizing mini-epic that, like preceding cut “Voyager Records: Greetings,” is built on sounds curated by his grandfather, Carl Sagan. The late, great astronomer created a soundbank that traveled into space with the Voyager 1 & 2 shuttles in the 1970s, just in case the starships made contact with alien life. Where “Stranger Than Fiction” differs, however, is in its more Hip-Hop-indebted sound, which pays homage to Tonio’s earlier years as a producer. There’s still an intergalactic wave to the track—those synthesizers are superbly science fiction—but it’s grounded by its Boom bap tempo and sample choices. Those include touches from “Melancholy Blues” by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven, in addition to the first movement (“Allegro Con Brio”) from Beethoven’s Symphony Number 5 in C Minor. “Voyager Records: Stranger Than Fiction” is now available through all major digital retailers and streaming platforms, and can be purchased on limited edition 7-inch gold vinyl, along with the A-Side, “Greetings” which first hit SoundCloud in late September.

Running is faster than walking, driving faster than biking, and interstellar spacecraft faster then cars and planes. Blasting away from our little yellow star at over 38,000 miles per hour, Voyager 1, with its planetary sample of human music, its interstellar mix and mashup, is, at eleven miles a second, moving away from our sun faster than any other spacecraft known to man. Voyager 2 lags behind—only a couple of light minutes—actually a considerable amount, since that’s about 25 times the distance from the Earth to the sun! Probably unheard yet in space, the Voyager record is gold-plated copper. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is the farthest human-made object from Earth. A very pure sample of the isotope uranium-238 is electroplated upon the LP’s cover. The thought is that aliens, perhaps far in the future, may be able to use the half-life of that isotope, which is 4.468 billion years, to figure out how long ago lived the organisms that sent it. Coordinated with neurotransmitters and ion flows, the electrochemical impulses scientists link to thought (such as you reading this) travel at the rather staid rate of 20-30 meters per second. But even the fastest neural impulses, which can reach 200 miles per hour, travel three million times slower than the speed of electricity through a wire. That’s almost (up to 90 percent) the speed of light. It seems incredible, then, that this physical basis of thought, itself way slower than electricity, loses—as does light itself—in a race with the