13/08/2026
"This is actually happening at this very moment.
To coincide with a total solar eclipse that's possible to be seen from Greenland, Iceland, northern Spain, and the Arctic, the International Space Orchestra is going to perform their own instrumental interpretation of the recently-released PJ Harvey track, "Voyager," which was released in June.
Released via Partisan Records, the song was already taking shape for Harvey’s forthcoming project when physicist Brian Cox approached her about contributing music to his ongoing Emergence tour. The collaboration sent Harvey’s imagination into deep space.
Named after NASA’s Voyager probes — launched in 1977 with Carl Sagan’s famed Golden Record aboard — “Voyager” was recorded with a full orchestra at the Brad Pitt-owned Miraval Studios in Provence and balances celestial string arrangements against pulsing synth signals that evoke messages drifting through the cosmos.
Harvey said she embraced the unusual assignment by imagining the spacecraft itself speaking. “I was excited for the challenge to compose a song in the ‘voice’ of Voyager 2,” she explains. “I have long been fascinated by the spacecraft and its journey, and asked myself what it might say to us if it could?”
The idea clicked immediately with Cox, who heard echoes of the probe’s transmissions in Harvey’s early demo. From there, she expanded the piece with composer Dario Marianelli, building an orchestral backdrop around themes of distance, fragility and wonder. “I’m very happy with the end result,” Harvey said. “It’s wonderful to hear the orchestral score bring such expansiveness to my music. I thoroughly enjoyed researching the history and journey of Voyager 1 and 2, and was glad to be able to quote the great Carl Sagan within the song, and his famous description of our fragile and beautiful ‘pale blue dot.’”
Lyrically, “Voyager” contemplates humanity’s place in the universe — “a flake of snow, dust in a sunbeam” — while arriving at a simple conclusion: choose light and choose love"
source: SPIN
‘Voyager’ by PJ Harvey, out now on Partisan Records: https://pjharv...