Human Presence by Hair and Space Museum

“The music I’ve heard feels a bit like watching the birth of humanity from space.” This is how the artist Joey Veltkamp described the first music that Emily Pothast and David Golightly released under the name Midday Veil in 2009. At the time, the duo was recording at home, primarily using vintage analog synthesizers and richly textured, often wordless vocals to weave shimmering, slow-building sonic tapestries.

While Midday Veil morphed into a rock band, Pothast and Golightly continued to work as a duo, performing long-form improvised soundscapes and creating immersive audiovisual installations under the name Hair and Space Museum. During its first decade, HaSM organized sleepover concerts, performed in a planetarium with a live laser artist, and shared stages with Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Norm Chambers, and Laraaji. Their recorded output, however, has thus far remained elusive.


The two side-long tracks on Human Presence were recorded in Seattle in 2012, the year we were promised the world would end, but it didn’t. Each was recorded in a single take with no overdubs.

The first track, “Heliosheath,” was produced just as the Voyager 1 space probe became the first manmade object to pass beyond the outermost region of the solar system. The music conjures a sense of rapturous awe tinged with melancholy, both for the otherworldly aspirations embodied in this lonely little object and the equally profound misguidedness of the military-industrial culture that launched it — the irony of yearning for extraterrestrial contact while subjecting the miraculous richness of life on Earth to extractive violence in the same gesture. This recording subsequently provided the soundtrack for the Hair and Space Museum installation “Infinity Music Machine,” where audiences could listen on headphones while zoning out inside a light-tight black pyramid as an earthbound alternative to interstellar travel. 


A drifting galaxy of twinkling arpeggiators and diaphanous drone, “Passage” is the audio component of a multimedia installation created by HaSM for Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival in 2012. This installation also featured a ceiling-mounted projector that generated analog video feedback in real time so that visitors entering the exhibition hall would transform the flowing, organic patterns on the floor by walking through them, creating a constantly shifting visual echo of their presence. Like “Heliosheath,” its tone is ecstatic and elegiac—an ambivalent witness to the cursed blessings of the human project.

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"According to numerological calculations, 2012 was meant to either be a cataclysmic or transformative year, depending on the kind of eschatologist you asked. While the world marched on largely unscathed, the foretold end times brought a transformation for musician, historian and Wire contributor Emily Pothast and composer David Golightly’s band Midday Veil, one of the most exciting psychedelic rock outfits to emerge in the past two decades.

Formed in 2009 as a duo, by 2012 the Seattle based group had grown into a five-piece and begun deviating from their expansive kosmische beginnings towards firmer forms, culminating with 2015’s majestic This Wilderness on which Italo disco and synth pop shared space with motorik prog and a guest spot from Parliament-Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrell. Simultaneously, Golightly and Pothast initiated their duo project Hair And Space Museum with the aim of exploring the soft interstitial spaces of the universe and beyond.

Recorded 12 years ago and released on this year’s Autumnal Equinox, Human Presence comprises two serenely meandering pieces that sound like Tangerine Dream or Ash Ra Tempel phrases slowed down tenfold, then expanded into eternity. Neither day nor night, ecstatic nor morose, the mood is awash in dusky orange tones. Reverberant synth textures of immense volume, gleams of shooting arpeggios and murmured vocalisations drift effortlessly across vast spaces while ruminating on humanity’s potential for creation and destruction.

Although “Heliosheath” and “Passage” were originally part of the duo’s multimedia installations, both 25 minute cuts are thoroughly enjoyable as standalone music. Golightly, a masterful synthesist, reigns in his virtuosity in favour of sustaining translucent drones, while Pothast leaves behind the commanding inflection she had shown with Midday Veil for a diffuse textural delivery. As the promise of universal enlightenment becomes more distant with each passing day, let the future at least bring us more music from this pair."

- Antonio Poscic, The Wire, Dec. 2024


"Hair and Space Museum looked like benevolent cult leaders in their all-white attire.... At Cairo, HASM dropped a subatomic balm on the crowd. Golightly coaxed swarming cascades of Moog Voyager and Roland Juno-60 tones that seemed cruelly cramped by Cairo's tight dimensions. You could feel them vibrating around the ceiling, itching to frolic in remotest space. Pothast summoned deeeeep emotions and loosed them via her expressive repertoire of deliveries (earth goddess, soul healer, demonic diva)..."
– Dave Segal, The Stranger (2012 live review)

sound creates the universe / universe returns the favor

HaSM is David Golightly and Emily Pothast.