Composed and conducted by one Art Mineo, Man in Space with Sounds served as the soundtrack to the futuristic "Bubbleator" exhibit at the 1962 Seattle World"s Fair. Decades of water under the Space Needle have imbued it with kitsch value on par with similarly "out" recordings by Esquivel and Martin Denny. But if you look past its inherited irony, there"s an uneasy dichotomy to Man in Space that"s as old as our dreams. A World"s Fair tour guide narrates Mineo"s compositions with canned enthusiasm and period nonsequiturs, but the music itself can be disorienting, even bleak. As our Don Pardo-in-training proclaims, "If there is one theme which dominates our tour in space, it is man"s eternal search for a brighter future," Mineo cautions--with horror-flick string melodies and frigid electronic oscillations--that we should be careful what we search for. After all, we might just find it. --Matt Hanks