On September 30, the people behind much-beloved Pop-Up Magazine and the Noise Pop music festival are teaming up for an epic one-night-only event of music, sound and storytelling, exploring the ideas that define California in particular. This is great news even without a "why," but there's a big reason behind this big event:
When NASA launched the Voyager space crafts back in 1977, each of the two probes carried a special piece of cargo. Known as the Golden Record (even though, dinner-party-convo tip, there were two records and they were actually made of copper and only coated with gold) they were albums of recordings intended to carry the idea of human civilization out to any beings who might find them. To figure out which recordings to include, NASA turned supervision of the program over to Carl Sagan and his wife Ann Druyan. They chose spoken language, nature sounds and selections of music which might be of interest to anyone who listened—40,000 years into the future.
If you look around the music being created today, what might you pick to send out in an interstellar time capsule? What stories would you tell to report on our world today?
Inspired by those questions, Pop-Up Magazine and Noise Pop music festival are planning an epic, one-night-only event. A Golden Record for the Golden State.
Tickets are on sale tomorrow for The Golden State Record at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. The 7,500 seat auditorium will play host to a multimedia show featuring musicians, story tellers, filmmakers and other creatives engaging with big themes. The full listing of performers is secret for now, but will be released before the September 30 event.
One major way that this event is totally unlike Sagan’s Golden Record? Instead of creating a recorded work built to last for thousands of years of posterity, Pop-Up Magazine is going the exact opposite direction. Nothing at the live event will be recorded or ever put online. It’s a moment you’ll need to see with your human eyes as it unfolds.
The Golden State Record takes place at 8pm on September 30 at the Greek Theatre, 2001 Gayley Road, Berkeley. Tickets go on sale Thursday, July 28 at noon.