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Based out of New York, Ghost Funk Orchestra has a sound that’s as much of a blast from the past as it is modern. Any fan of Motown and ‘60s psychedelia is bound to love what this band has going on and the same can be said for any current aficionado of jam, jazz and soul music. This is exemplified in their new full-length release “A Trip To The Moon” that came out on February 23 via Colemine & Karma Chief Records. The music abides by a space age concept that’s bound to put any stage they perform on into orbit, including the Space Ballroom in Hamden on April 10. The upcoming show is part of a double-headlining tour with fellow New Yorker and psychedelic jazz wizard Marco Benevento with it all starting at 8pm.
I had a talk ahead of the performance with guitarist, composer, arranger and producer Seth Applebaum about the making of the album, finding archived recordings of NASA space missions and looking forward to returning to Connecticut.
RD: “A Trip To The Moon” revolves around the central theme of space travel with ’60s psychedelia and soul being fused into the music, so what would you say inspired this particular theme? Were you reading a lot of science fiction books before you started writing the music for this record?
SA: Honestly, I didn’t initially set out to make a space record. I started writing songs and while I was sort of getting into the thick of assembling an album’s worth of material, that’s when I stumbled on all of the public domain recordings from the NASA missions. I started cherry picking bits and pieces of those recordings and turning them into the album sequence just to see how it felt. In a weird way, even though the songs that existed at that point in the process weren’t space themed, it did sort of fit the tone, so I made the decision that I was going to use the recordings as sort of a glue for the track list. Then I wrote the remaining songs with the space theme in mind.
I just thought that it was an interesting element because the recordings were so candid. Also, I couldn’t have planned it this way, but the day the record was released was actually the day of the latest moon mission launching, so it was kind of wild.
RD: Yeah, that is wild. Those sound bites that you’re talking about are from the actual audio transmissions between the crew of Apollo 11 and the capsule communicator at the Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas in July of 1969 in the days surrounding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin successfully landing on the moon. How did you go about finding these recordings? Are they available on NASA’s website, were they at your local library or did you find them somewhere else?
SA:They are available on the public archive at archive.org, which is a website that I’ve spent a lot of time on because I’ve made some music videos in the past that use found footage and I like to surf around for found footage on there. It just kind of popped into my head when I was making the record. I remembered there being a press release and a little bit of buzz about all of these recordings being made available online, so they’re all on archive.org. There’s also photographs from the missions that are in the public domain as well. There’s tons and tons of recordings, some of them are just long stretches of silence and noise, but then there are these little blips of conversation. I was kind of surfing through them to find the jewels.
RD: Very cool, that’s great. Ghost Funk Orchestra functions as a collective with you handling compositions and arrangements while also handling the production of the recordings. With this structure in tow, how do you go about picking which musicians and artists serve best for each song?
SA:At this point in our existence, it’s mostly from experience from the people I work with. When it comes to vocals, I’m pretty intimately aware of the singers, I know what their range is and I know what the tone of their voice is so I can kind of make an educated guess when I’m getting ready to finish a song on who would be the best fit to lead it based on my experience. As far as arranging, it’s also kind of a gut thing. Sometimes I’ll record as much of the song as I can muster myself, which will usually be the drums, percussion, bass, guitars and keyboards. Then depending on what I feel the song needs to seal the deal, that’s when I’ll kind of decide whether to make it a horn heavy song versus a string song or is it nothing with just the rhythm section and vocals.
It’s different in every case and I just have to trust my gut about what I think the song is needing as far as color, complexity or just having something different steering the boat, so to speak.
RD: Ok, I get that. How do you go about incorporating this structure when it comes to performing live? Is there a main core for the band along with yourself or is it more interchangeable?
SA: It’s a little bit of both. I do have a core of people that nine times out of 10 they’re the band that you’ll see live. Especially last year, we took a lot of these last-minute offers and by virtue of how big the band is and my needs are, the stars don’t always align where I can get the exact same players. After going through last year and having a bit of a fluctuating lineup, I now have a lot of people that are very familiar with the music and they’ve been broken in on it so we can deliver a really consistent show even if the band looks a little different. I will say that this year so far has been very consistent and the core of the band is consistent across all the dates that we have booked so far.
The way that I arrange the songs for our live performance is a bit different because not every song on the recordings has the horn section or has vocal harmonies. Since the horns are on stage the whole time and the singers are on stage the whole time, we’ve found ways to make sure that nobody’s time is going unused and finding fun ways to amp everything up so that it has its own life as a live song that’s a little different than what you hear on the recordings.
RD: Speaking of performing live, what are your thoughts on coming to the Space Ballroom as part of your tour with Marco Benevento?
SA: I’m psyched. We played Space Ballroom with Marco a couple years ago and we had a great time. It’s always fun to return to any venue, but especially with the same bill, it’ll be sort of like a homecoming, so to speak. We’re really excited to be on the road with Marco this year, we did a little weekender with him back in 2022 that included a stop at Space Ballroom and we got along really well, so we kept in touch during last year and now we’re doing a bunch of stuff with him in 2024. It’s been really exciting to get back together with him and it’s also exciting to play a show in Connecticut because it doesn’t happen as often as it should.
Except for the Space Ballroom, I feel like Connecticut gets passed over a lot. This venue feels like the place where people come to the state to play and it’s close enough to us that it seems like it should be an obvious choice. It’s not always easy to pin down a venue, so I’m very excited that we get to come back.
Who: Ghost Funk Orchestra
When: April 10, 2024 at 8 p.m.
Where: Space Ballroom, 295 Treadwell St., Hamden, CT 06514
Rob Duguay is an arts & entertainment journalist based in Providence, RI who is originally from Shelton, CT. Outside of the Connecticut Examiner, he also writes for DigBoston, The Aquarian Weekly, The Providence Journal, The Newport Daily News, Worcester Magazine, New Noise Magazine and numerous other publications. While covering mostly music, he has also written about film, TV, comedy, theatre, visual art, food, drink, sports and cannabis.