N.A.S.A and a “7 years in the making movie….”

Sam Spiegel (Squeak E. Clean) and Ze Gonzales (DJ Zegon) are N.A.S.A, aka. North America/South America. In case you didn’t know, the two of them released an album called The Spirit of Apollo in 2009. This album is special for a few reasons. One would be the badass collaborations they have going on in there with folk such as Tom Waits, Spank Rock, Method Man, M.I.A, Cool Kids, Santogold, Amanda Blank, Ghostface Killah and David Byrne to name a few. Two would be the bad-ass music videos they have going on for these songs. If you haven’t seen their collaboration with Tom Waits in Spacious Thoughts, (posted above) then please stop, watch it and continue your reading.
Now if you were a fan of this in 2009 and/or if you are a new fan since right now, you should know that the album took over 5 years to make. The “Movie” for the album apparently according to N.A.S.A’s twitter this week is “finally finished” after seven years of work. This sounds pretty cool. I would love to see what they’ve come up with.
I don’t know how much Spiegel being Spike Jonzes brother has anything to do with it, but I must say N.A.S.A is genius in their blending of art and music. We all love that, and it’s always better when collaborations cut across genre’s because in the days of pro-tools-logic-every-ones-a-producer-beware-of-beat-inflation as I like to call it, the best way to stay fresh and ahead is to find those interesting, unique or lost samples, as well as bringing to fruition the odd genre-bending-collaboration. For any artist who wants to survive 2011, I urge you to remember some of the good shit 2009 brought us, such as N.A.S.A, and I’m gonna throw in Fever Ray just because Karin Dreijer put on the best live show of 2009 which crossed over into 2010 and this new year :)