Something new: space jam

Hong Kong record label Platinum Metres is less than a year old, so you'd expect it to be taking baby steps. Instead, it's about to go stratospheric. Last month, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield made headlines by beaming a rendition of David Bowie's Space Oddity back to Earth from the International Space Station. In August, Platinum Metres' founder, British-born artist Joshua Thomson, plans to do the reverse by launching a digital version of his otherwise vinyl-only label's eponymous first LP into space.

"We have a shrinking planet but expanding minds," says Thomson, whose pipedream is to be realised in partnership with NanoSatisfi, a company that provides affordable access to "user-programmable, in-orbit" mini-satellites, or "nanosats" (left) - thus democratising space, if you please.

So far, so avant garde, but, as Thomson explains, the project is "a reworking of and tribute to Nasa's Voyager Golden Records" - phonograph records containing music and sounds intended to inform extraterrestrials about life on Earth that were sent aboard the interstellar Voyager I and II spacecraft when they were launched in 1977. "It's a mixture of knowledge and speculation, conjecture and fantasy. Like Nasa's original [it] is intended as a statement of hope in pessimistic times."

That hope is expressed in an LP that encompasses jazz, funk, ambient, folk and post-rock music. It was recorded over five years in Britain, Thailand and Hong Kong and will be accompanied into orbit by a series of 145 paintings and ink works titled The Sights of Planet Earth, one of which features the fly at the top of this page. A line of poetry by American writer Emily Wolahan - "listen in praise of one cosmos" - will be broadcast in a loop, in morse code; and fly, funk, the whole shebang, are to be shot into deep space via light waves. Or something.