Dinosaur days

"Synthesizers dictate the wonder, anticipation, and fear of exploring a 16-bit moon. It is a world half-remembered in neon synth beams, arpeggio craters, and washed in a liquid glass glaze." So goes a self-description of Philadelphia retro synth pilots Dinosaurs On Fire. Of course, the 'blague is not usually in the business of career hype or copy/pasting press promos. But I respect bands that bother to make visual what their aesthetic is going for. Also, I kinda couldn't have said it better myself. Here's a groovy tune from their debut album. Suitable for exploring inner and outer space alike.

Dinosaurs On Fire - Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes

Alien industry

Still kinda digging this tendency toward wordlessness. You may be familiar with Jean Michel Jarre from his flamboyant and atmospheric work, but it's good to know that he had a fair bit of musique concrète in his genes too. Talk about industrial music! This should be playing in a power plant breakroom on Venus.

Jean Michel Jarre - La Cage

Silver age

The thing about being "ahead of your time" is that you never get full credit for your innovations if time never actually catches up to you. So it went with the Silver Apples, who used a fairly limited sound palette to produce some of the coolest, most distinct music of the '60s (also some of the least '60s sounding). There are so many ways the space age could've gone. These guys charted a course we still haven't even embarked on.

Silver Apples - Lovefingers
Silver Apples - Misty Mountain

Replicant rock

I've been having quite the musical crush on Gary Numan lately. Such a bummer that he got tagged with one-hot-wonderdom, because he produced a really nice string of dystopian/robotic/androgynous, yet quite catchy, music. In fact, I'd say as much as anyone he elaborated on Bowie's Low-era innovations. And with some glammy sass too. He could've been the biggest star in a Blade Runner world.

Songblague has previously given Numan a little of his due, but here's a day all for him. This tune is just right — foreboding and becalmed at once. Like a beautiful flight through the clouds above a nervous and troubled world.

Gary Numan - The Aircrash Bureau

Future Olympics

Oh man, the endless treasures of vintage Library music. You have to discard some chaff, but the effort yields precious rewards. This one should soundtrack some sort of futuristic bloodsport competition. Or a videogame version of it. Or whatever wild stuff you do this weekend.

Gerard Gesina - Big Green Espace

Crepuscular activity

Keeping with the strange fusions. It took an odd set of post-punkers to hitch their wagon to samba styles that must've seemed a million miles from their time. But these juxtapositions just remind us how arbitrary any time is and how many different versions could exist. Taking a cue from the cover, I prefer to imagine these streams flowing into a future I may be brave enough to inhabit. Or at least an apartment I might rent. Here are two songs from that world — one coldly wacked-out cover, the other a warm bolus of mechanical sunshine.

Antena - The Boy From Ipanema

Antena - Camino Del Sol

Yellow magic

For those who think the Germans had a monopoly on visionary robotic synth pop, here's a track for you. Some crispy, groovy music for a car chase on a highway of the future.

Yellow Magic Orchestra - Solid State Survivor

New York, 2061

OK, enough of the sunniness. Yesterday morning, the sky opened up just in time to drench me on the last patch of sidewalk as I darted into work. A mean gray sky over the Chrysler Building can't help but bring all kinds of Blade Runner-isms to mind. Hence, this beautiful sprawling piece of dark ambient sci-fi noir. I like to listen to it in my 187th-floor apartment.

Dylan Ettinger - Penguin Point

Bubbles in the brain

I suppose if you're going to cover a sultry jazz standard, it helps to be from another planet. Or the future. Or France circa 1980. This one reminds me of another weird work of re-imagination.

Lio - You Go To My Head

Afterlife entrance music

If yesterday's song seemed fitting for a funeral procession, this one leaps into the imaginary next step — a passage into the crystal kingdom of infinite whatever. And who doesn't want to be there? It's a little cartoonish, but that kind of agreeable over-the-topness is what Library music does best. The real question is why has no rapper sampled this yet?

Bruce Mitchell & Rick Miller - Space City

Surfing on a rocket

Like they say, if you've got a good schtick, you may as well schtick with it. Hello...is this thing on? Anyway, these fine young space warriors worked that instrumental surf rock/B-movie sci-fi dialogue sample combo for all it was worth and maybe a little more. Part of me wishes I had that kind of focus. Another part wishes I were far more eclectic in my pursuits. The bum-out part of me fears I may be in the middle.

As for the Astro-men, their EEVIAC album (stands for Embedded Electronic Variably Integrated Astro Console, if you care) ventured into slightly more adventurous territory and still rocks it out pleasingly. It's also chock full of great mainframe-geekout song titles.

Man Or Astro-Man - A Reversal Of Polarity

Dappling

The snow is melting. The sun is out, which isn't stopping the cold from cracking my fingerskin. Time for some pulsing electronic warmth to hasten the thaw. It's probably no accident that seeing the (awesome) Bauhaus exhibit at MOMA has put me in a mood for this Berlin School masterpiece.

Manuel Göttsching titled the album New Age of Earth, and this leadoff track dances maybe a little too close to the piffle that "New Age" would come to signify in the '80s. Still, this stuff is miles away from California ponytails, even if its got similar hippie roots. I like the terrestrial era that Göttsching is envisioning—placid, sun-dappled melody and sequencers that manage to be robotic and benign. How do we get back to that future?

Ashra - Sunrain

Post-apocalyptic civic duty

I received my jury duty notice the other day. While it's pretty awesome that the State wants to entrust me with the deciding of an actual legal matter, I can't say I'm thinking much about it. Instead, my mind drifts back to the last time my number was called. Early 2003. The winter was bitter. Bush was on the warpath. I was vaguely depressed and enmeshed in one of Mike Davis's drearier riffs on the tortured decline and death of American urbanism.

In the central jury room, they showed us a video about American Justice. A bunch of actors depicting medieval villagers threw a woman into a lake to see if she was a witch. Then Ed Bradley appeared on camera to explain the virtues of our evolved legal system. Early in the day, I ran into an ex, and we went for an awkward lunch. In the afternoon, I froze up horribly while a girl attempted to chat me up in the hall outside one of the courtrooms. I spent the next two days in the grand courthouse waiting for something to happen. All the while, I imagined how pop songs might be conceived and enjoyed in one of those future dystopia movies from the early '80s. Not the main theme, just one of the casual numbers the characters might listen to at night in a moment of calm. It sounded a lot like this.

Shy Child - Mercury and Sun