“I’m using sounds that were created billions of years ago,” said Hart.

On the album, Hart worked with Nobel Prize winner George Smoot, an astrophysicist who took the light and radio waves from the solar winds, orbiting planets, black holes, stars, galaxies, and the Big Bang and converted them into sound waves, which uses a process called “ sonification.” The resulting music defies time and space, giving a new meaning to “celestial” sounding music. Since his Grateful Dead days, Hart has always been trying to expand the horizons of music, and with this album he has expanded beyond the horizon into the farthest depths of space. The show began with ambient, percussion based “The Jungle,” which lead effortlessly into the literally spaced-out “Time Never Ends,” off the band’s new album “ Mysterium Tremendum.” After a brief hiatus, he returned to the band in 1974 and continued playing with them until lead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995. Mickey Hart played drums and percussion for the Grateful Dead from 1967 to 1971. From gray-haired Deadheads easily in their 60’s to college aged folks, everybody was smiling at the prospect that they were about to see a legend still bursting with creativity.

Walking into the Intersection to see the Mickey Hart Band, I was overwhelmed by the sense of community that follows any living member of the Grateful Dead. Thinking about, wow, dancing with the infinite universe, yeah I can't resist that.' 'Then, to be able to have a conversation with it somehow, an intelligent conversation, and play with these sounds was also something that was very appealing to me. If these could now be heard, that would tell the story, sonically, of the universe.' All of these epic events could now be heard, and that was an interesting notion. When the blank page of the universe exploded, it created the galaxies, planets, stars, black holes, pulsars. This is where all the rhythm and all the life and everything we know now started. Where did we come from, how did we get here and why? What is our part in this great timeline? One of the reasons I was interested in the Big Bang was because it was beat one, it was the downbeat. It came to the ancients as they pondered the night sky.” 'The title Mysterium Tremendum means the sense of awe and wonder we feel about the vastness of the infinite universe.

First grateful dead drums and space