[Cover photo features Ghost Funk Orchestra’s Seth Applebaum, credit to Seth Applebaum]

February 2024 sees Ghost Funk Orchestra release their fifth album, A Trip To The Moon. The second single from the LP, accompanied by a video, is “Again,” which seems to be “a record of a breakthrough moment.” Romi Hanoch provides vocal performance and Stuart Bogie also appears as guest saxophonist.

This was particularly meaningful for composer/Producer Seth Applebaum, who grew up and cut his teeth as a New York musician looking up to Bogie and his peers in Antibalas and Superhuman Happiness. 

Seth Applebaum, Ghost Funk Orchestra’s commander-in-chief, composes, produces, and arranges the music in his upstate New York “subterranean lab”. His fascination with space and space travel made its way onto the new record. 

While working on the instrumentals for the album, he became aware that Internet Archive had made the sound footage of the Apollo to Mission Control transmissions accessible in the public domain, which, once he started listening, gave him the idea of using that narrative as a binder for the music which was coming to life. 

Also looking at photography regarding space travel, he was struck by the “gusto” with which new technology was embraced in the pop culture of the day, and honored that tradition in the creation of A Trip To The Moon.

Applebaum used digital recording techniques to cobble together orchestrations incorporating ’60s & ’70s analog keyboards and the guitar sounds reminiscent of early Surf bands from the ’50s and ’60s.

Ghost Funk Orchestra’s new album A Trip to the Moon is out February 23rd, 2024 via Karma Chief Records.