Time and time again, Jack White’s Third Man Records has reinvented vinyl, spearheading the medium’s resurgence in an otherwise digital landscape. Now, in a teaser video posted to the TMR website, the label has promised to “make vinyl history again.”

The video (above), spotted first by Billboard, is really vague, but it does give a couple clues to what TMR’s intentions might be. After the message—“July 30, Third Man Records is going to make vinyl history again”—appears in Star Wars-esque scroll, we see the infamous Golden Record flipping through the air. The LP was famously launched aboard Voyager 1 in 1977 to introduce our way of life to whoever stumbled across the ship. A NASA committee, chaired by Carl Sagan, selected its contents, choosing to include various terrestrial noises and a selection of earth’s music, from Mozart to Chuck Berry.

In the video, one track can be read on the LP’s label: “A Glorious Dawn” by Carl Sagan, an arrangement of wise words culled from the original Cosmos and rendered alongside music in glorious, glorious vocoder. Incidentally, Third Man Records released the track as a 7” record back in 2009 (it’s currently out of print). So, considering all of this, just what is happening on July 30?

This must be more than just a reprinting of the Sagan 7”, right? We know Jack White to be both a man of genius and a man of many, many convictions. Maybe he’s planning a mission to update the Golden Record? Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B Goode” is the most recent track on the traveling disc, after all; maybe White doesn’t feel that’s indicative of who we’ve become since 1977. With the advent of faster space travel technology, it wouldn’t be infeasible to imagine that we could catch Voyager 1 and add to it. Maybe a giant white stripe across the front? Or a bit of adhesive and some store bought bones, now that we better understand DNA sequencing? Or could it be that Jack White is finally going to admit that he’s an alien from the future that once intercepted the Golden Record, learned our ways, and then came to earth to rise to fame and power? He’s finally announcing his bid for world domination? That’s probably it.

What do you think Jack White is up to? Let us know in the comments.

Image: David James Swanson