Hasta La Ideas

Album artwork by Shepard Fairey

We’ve seen some collaborative projects in our time here at CR – but the forthcoming debut album by N.A.S.A., entitled The Spirit Of Apollo (due out February 16 on Anti-) stands apart: it comes with no less than five interchangeable covers by Shepard Fairey, Sage Vaughn, The Date Farmers, Marcel Dzama and Mark Gonzales…

Los Angeles based artist Sage Vaughn’s artwork includes a disco ball, rockets and a couple of sleepy astronauts

The Date Farmers draw on Mexican street murals and beer labels for their version

Canadian artist Marcel Dzama’s painterly artwork

Mark Gonzalez went with an aquatic theme

N.A.S.A. (which stands for North America South America) is the brainchild of North American Squeak E Clean and the Brazilian DJ Zegon. Squeak E Clean is a DJ, producer and remixer of some acclaim and is, in fact, the brother of a certain Spike Jonze. It was Squeak E Clean (real name, Sam Spiegel) who scored and compiled music for Jonze’s cult skateboard movie Yeah Right – and Spiegel also worked with Karen O of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs on the music for Hello Tomorrow, the Spike Jonze-directed Adidas commercial that won a Gold Lion for Best Music at the 2005 Cannes International Advertising Festival…

Remove all the interchangeable card sleeves to reveal the booklet – which features imagery licensed from NASA Images on the cover and throughout…

But wait, The Spirit Of Apollo isn’t just a collaboration between two producers… The album has taken six years to make – in part because it was a personal project created in between client-based jobs and not least because the N.A.S.A. duo had a dream list of artists they wanted to try and contact and work with on the project. The result is a collaboration-rich musical project that features unexpected results. For example, Kook Keith and Tom Waits pair up on track Spacious Thoughts – while David Byrne, Chalie 2na (of Jurassic 5), Gift of Gab and Z-Trip all feature in Money (we featured the Shepard Fairey-tastic video for this track on the blog last week), and the rest of the album features vocal turns by the likes of Kanye West, Santogold, George Clinton, Chuck D, SPank Rock, M.I.A., Method Man and a whole lot more… Here’s the full album tracklist which shows who’s on what track:

Credits:
Designed by Trevor Hernandez. Characters by Marcel Dzama. Drawings by Gonz. Space imagery courtesy of Nasa Images.

Find out more at myspace.com/nasa