An exquisite experiment, Apollo takes Eno's spacescapes from albums like Another Green World and arranges them with some heavenly pedal steel guitar by Daniel Lanois. The recording engulfs the listener and captures the feel of space travel, weightlessness, and other sensations vividly. It's also perhaps Eno's warmest record ever. In the end, it comes off sounding not unlike a Grateful Dead experiment, with Lanois' lazy pedal steel sounding quite similar to Jerry Garcia's playing on David Crosby's "Laughing." An excellent nighttime vehicle. — Matthew Greenwald
If you ever wondered what ambient music is all about, you could do worse than listen to the soundtrack by Brian Eno that accompanied the stunning visuals of NASA's Apollo missions to the moon. Created with an intoxicating mixture of acoustic and electronic, the music makes the now-classic space travel images more magical and memorable, introducing a dreamlike element to scenes of cold reality. "An Ending (Ascent)" is about as close to an actual tune as you'll get, but, as with every track, a shining example of what ambient music reveals about itself--slowly and carefully. --Paul Clark
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