Downtempo Electronica

hifinutt

Wammer
Wammer Plus
Dec 23, 2007
16,571
4,860
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midlands , , United
AKA
phil
HiFi Trade?
  1. No
interesting bit of history behind that album 

"It was whilst listening to “Patashnik” by Biosphere and reading that the word Patashnik was intended by Geir Jenssen (aka Biosphere) to be slang for a cosmonaut who never returned from space (although this is debated and doesn’t appear to be a real Russian word). I started thinking about Laika, who was a stray mongrel dog picked up in Moscow that became the first living creature to go into orbit around the Earth, in 1957.

Unfortunately, Laika became a Patashnik as she died in the endeavour. The sad part is that she was never meant to return – and even sadder is that it eventually emerged that she had died from stress and overheating long before she ran out of oxygen.

This death caused a degree of controversy outside of the Soviet Union, and even some concern within it – in an environment where protest was not always easy. It all did have an effect and, consequently, future dog missions were designed so that the dogs would be recovered, So, just under three years later, two dogs, Belka and Strelka, became the first living creatures to orbit the Earth and return to Earth, in 1960.

I was quite inspired by this group of stray dogs, collected up and forced to undergo difficult and rigorous training, helping to set up the Soviet Space Programme. I became inspired by the concept of Laika being a Patashnik and this led me on a journey of discovery that made the time disappear and made me richer in knowledge at the end of it.

Those little dogs played such an important part in the Race into Space, something that itself underpinned the Cold War world of the 1960’s, when I was growing up."

 
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