First Contact with Galactaron

Girl meets synth-rock band from Outer Space; animated weirdness ensues. Well, that’s the elevator pitch, anyway. See for yourself:

Galactaron were dreamt up as an art/music project by Owen Dennis, a recent graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Animation, and are comprised of Singer (centre right), Bass (bottom left), Guitar (centre left), Synth (right), Drums (top left) and their human friend Emily Wong:

Galactaron Album Cover
Album Cover as featured on iTunes

The virtual band have a presence across Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm, SoundCloud and iTunes, with each platform offering new information and imagery to enrich Galactaron’s back story:

Drawn by radio waves, Galactaron focused in on Earth and they traveled a great distance to learn about us. When they finally reached our planet, they landed their massive, red, egg-shaped ship on a frozen lake in the upper Midwest of the America. There they met Emily Wong, a young Chinese-American woman who lives with her father. Emily quickly befriended Galactaron and decided to give them a personalized tour of planet Earth. That’s when they started to discover what earth is, what humans are, and what we have to offer.

A ‘sighting’ of their ship forms one of several on their website.

It’s an admirable project: the band have a truly unique sound, a strong visual identity, a cool backstory, and they’ve even sold a few albums.

Their creator shows real ingenuity, having formed a small yet growing community around snippets of content such as cosmic ring-tones; science-themed status updates; user-contributed artwork; merchandise and not forgetting the music itself.

But despite being an excellent case study in transmedia storytelling, their single ‘First Contact’ has reached a surprisingly low 20,000 plays on YouTube, and far fewer elsewhere. Mission aborted? Or as I suspect, are their thrusters still warming up?

30 Day Song Challenge – Week Six

Day 26: a song that you can play on an instrument

Bonobo – Black Sands (album)

I can’t play any instruments, but this is the album I like to play about with on Djay, mixing software for iPad

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Day 27: a song that you wish you could play

Funkadelic – Maggot Brain

Voted best guitar solo ever, so get ready for a face-melter! Thanks to Andrew for the hookup.

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Day 28: a song that makes you feel guilty

Chemical Brothers ft. Richard Ashcroft – The Test

Hmm… no comment.

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Day 29: a song from your childhood

Leftfield – Melt

I remember this blaring out over the kitchen speakers as I began to develop a taste for music.

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Day 30: your favorite song at this time last year

Way Out West – Only Love

These guys were the soundtrack to my summer last year – nearly that time again!

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So there we have it, people – thirty songs that mean something to me in (at least in some small way). I hope this has been at all enlightening, it’s certainly been fun to put together. Don’t forget, you can always submit new music to me by adding to my collaborative Spotify playlist.

Happy listening, Tom x