Attilio Mineo

Born on August 28, 1918, in Brooklyn, New York, Attilio Mineo built a career as a space-age pop composer and arranger. He took up piano duties across assorted big bands once high school ended, later directing his own orchestra at intervals across nearly thirty years. Frequent songwriting sessions with spouse Toni led him to accept outside commissions as a means of financing personal projects, including a 1962 assignment to score the Seattle World's Fair's Bubbelator, the transparent spherical elevator designed for as many as 150 passengers. Paired with that attraction at the time of sale, the resulting LP Man in Space with Sounds fused electronic melodies, alien sound effects, and spoken-word introductions, exhausting its limited pressing almost at once and turning into a prized collectible for exotica devotees well before the 1998 reissue on Subliminal Sounds.