Kronos Quartet Shares "Sun Rings" Video For Apollo 11 Anniversary

New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Kronos Quartet has released a video for "Beebopterismo," a track from Sun Rings, its groundbreaking collaboration with composer Terry Riley, ahead of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on Saturday. The first recording of the 2002 piece, which had been commissioned in part by the NASA Art Program and includes plasma waves recorded from NASA spacecraft, including the Voyager 1 and 2 probes, will be released on Nonesuch Records on August 30. The video, edited by Robert Edridge-Waks, features footage from Willie Williams' visual design for the staged multimedia production of the piece, which has been performed by Kronos nearly fifty times in eleven countries and eighteen states.

"I began to listen to see what kind of musical element could be buried deep within the spectrum of their mostly raw, grainy sound," Terry Riley says of composing with the NASA space recordings. "There was a wide variety of sonic textures and frequencies of the different samples, often resembling both natural and synthesized sounds found here on Earth."

Sun Rings is available to pre-order from iTunes and the Nonesuch Store, where the album track "Beebopterismo" may be downloaded instantly, and will stream at Spotify and Apple Music.
Tune in to BBC Radio 3 this Sunday at 5pm BST to hear Sun Rings featured on a rebroadcast of an episode of The Listening Service about the Sounds of Space.