Albedo 0.39

In the last four minutes of the record, while synthesizer chords swell and fall away, a man reads out numbers. The mass of the Earth. The length of its year, in several different units. And last of all, its albedo. He is not a singer. The English Wikipedia names the voice as the album's own sound engineer, Keith Spencer-Allen. There is no singing anywhere on the record. The only human voices are his reading and the voices on the tapes Vangelis brought in from outside.

Where it sits in the history of music

The wider story is in Vangelis, where to start, and this is the record that guide puts first. It was the second album he made at Nemo Studios, the place he had set up in London in 1975. The first, Heaven and Hell, leaned on classical music and brought in a choir. This one turned the other way and let in the blues and jazz.

He played all of it: synthesizers and keyboards, but also bass, percussion, xylophone, gamelan and an acoustic drum kit. One line of the credits sums it up: Vangelis, synthesisers, keyboards, drums, bass, and all other sounds. Two sounds came from outside. One is the telephone speaking clock. The other is the radio traffic of the Apollo Moon landings, courtesy of NASA.

The title is the share of the light a planet receives that it reflects back into space. The back of the LP spells it out: "The reflecting power of a planet or other non-luminous body. A perfect reflector would have an Albedo of 100%. The Earth's Albedo is 39%, or 0.39."

Tracklist

Timings as measured from the first CD, RCA ND 74208 from 1989. The lengths printed on that CD are some way off. Tracks 1 to 5 are side one, 6 to 9 side two.

Three tracks, closely

"Alpha" (5:44). The guide's first pick. He sets up a simple theme a few bars long and then piles instruments on top of it one at a time. It opens on a slow synthesizer arpeggio. A mallet-like synthesizer line, xylophone and percussion follow, and the drums arrive late. He built pieces this way again and again on later records, Direct among them. Count the entrances. The theme never changes, but the piece keeps getting thicker.

"Pulstar" (5:44). The opener. A synthesizer pulse runs underneath, the main line rides on top of it, and several brassy synthesizer parts stack up above. It ends on a recording of the speaking clock. RCA wanted a single from the album and chose this one. Follow the pulse, and count how many brass layers pile onto it. At the very end, a clock tells you the time.

"Albedo 0.39" (4:20). The closer. Synthesizer chords and arpeggios rise and ebb while the voice reads out the physical properties of the Earth one by one. Listen to how the music and the reading fit together, and notice where the voice lands as the chords swell and as they drain away.

The rest of the record

"Freefall" (2:15) is a single synthesizer line over a turning gamelan figure. "Mare Tranquillitatis" (1:46) is named for the Sea of Tranquility, the lunar plain where Apollo 11 came down. It is a quiet synthesizer piece with Moon landing conversations drifting through it. "Main Sequence" (8:09) is the longest track. A jazz piece led by the drums grows over a pulsing sequence, then settles and runs straight into "Sword of Orion" (1:55). On side two, the two parts of "Nucleogenesis" take their name from the making of the elements. They are a collage of church organ, drums, bass and brassy synthesizers, darker than anything before them.

How to listen

• Side one without a break. You only hear "Main Sequence" turn into "Sword of Orion" if you let it run.
• Loud. As the guide says, Berlin is quiet and Vangelis is not.
• Once for the drums alone. He played them himself. Follow the kit through the synthesizers.
• Take notes on the last track. Write down the figures as the voice reads them. The last one is the title.

What happened next

It reached number 18 on the UK album chart, the first time one of his records had made the top 20. Heaven and Hell had been performed at the Royal Albert Hall, and in 1977 this record was played on the same stage.

The tracks went on to a long life of their own. Carl Sagan's Cosmos used both "Pulstar" and "Alpha." "Alpha" went under an animation of evolution, cut so that the music peaks just as humans appear. "Pulstar" became an early theme for ESPN's SportsCenter, and ran under the news in the Philippines and Indonesia and on local newscasts in Boston and Toronto. That is why the guide calls it the one everyone has heard on television.

The one track to send a friend

Send "Albedo 0.39". Tell them it runs a little over four minutes. Then add one line. The 0.39 the voice reads out for the Earth's albedo was the figure calculated in 1976. Today's figure is 0.30. The number on the cover has changed since the record came out.

Where to get it

The 1976 British RCA LP, RS 1080, is the defining edition. RCA put it out the same year in the United States, Canada and across Europe. On CD it first appeared on RCA in 1989, and in 2013 Esoteric Recordings released an edition remastered by Vangelis himself.

AmazonVangelis Albedo 0.39 on CD and vinyl.DiscogsEvery pressing of Albedo 0.39, from the 1976 British RCA RS 1080.

An engineer stands at a microphone and reads out the weight of the Earth. When he reaches the last number, the record stops.