FUTURE ROOM RECORDS

---

Future Room Records is the official depository of the conceptual musical works of Stavo Mustang Craft & his DIY art-pop project Galactic Witchcraft . It all began with the writing of a short story.. "THE FUTURE ROOM" ~ a fairytale for adults.. about the Self envisioned as a Space or room, comprised of Hallways Without End.. with your Future Evolution in Multi-Incarnational Form, intersecting across Time, in an interaction with your confined-consciousness of the moment. "Firstly, music was ever-present on The Futurist’s planet," the story goes.. "For, in actually, I learned, he was a song. And so was I, and everything else."

A period of 4-track demo song writing follows. Over 150 songs. Lyrics of inner-space & planetary transformation .. written with the idea of being songs that were not necessarily meant for 'now' - but which were odes for a Future Culture; each placed into the Crypt of Eternity to be discovered as artifacts at a later time, even possibly by other lifeforms. What exactly are these? Messages from the future discovered as relics from the past.

Then, more short stories with oil crayon & pencil illustrations, to expand on themes and context.  "The Future Room" ... "The Beauty Bomb" ... "A World of Aliens" .. Not aliens from 'outer' space & little green men, per se; but how alien we've become to ourselves, as we've merged so much with our technologies and the stories we have told ourselves through history, while living under social constructions that conspire to control our tastes, our impulses, and what we think are our desires. 

And the cosmic antenna kept receiving and transmitting... culminating in an original 8 CDs of these cassette-recorded demo songs, each with a promissory note in the sleeve: "Written & Recorded in the Bedroom ~ As musical sketches & blueprints for ideas to be completed in the future." (Literal, perhaps ~ but also a wink to unofficial culture.)

As a sweet cherry on top of an already rewarding creative spell, an indie label, Disques de Lapin, releases a CD/DVD compendium, "BE OTHER" with selected tracks from all the demo projects, as well as videos of different artists using Craft's homespun recordings as soundtracks for various performance art, modern dance, and video installation productions. New York City. Colombia. Australia. Amsterdam. Taiwan. Five continents. Purely by word of mouth and personal interaction, these home-recorded tracks were having a quiet impact.

Then another step in the evolution of this life-long art project arrives.. or was this that 'future time' to start building upon those early musical sketches? As with so many things, it springs from a random unanticipated moment of inspiration. Stavo's good friend, painter Timothy Cummings, is visiting. He says, "The only thing that can save the world now is Galactic Witchcraft." "What did you say?" Stavo replied. Tim repeated the idea. "I think you've just come up with the name for my music project," Stavo said. And the next phase materializes with compelling dimensions.

The concept was not about Wiccan ceremonies, but about art itself.. Art as an Answer ~ yet also about how art IS a form of witchcraft; taking intent & feeling & expression, and uniting that into something that transforms how we see & experience our reality. It produces change, and brings shifts... with no small degree of magic.

The recordings of Galactic Witchcraft were the first time that Stavo expanded the scope & scale of the production from cassettes (which suffer from various degrees of sound degrading & offer few layers) to a higher-resolution digital audio format with access to 8-tracks & beyond, to bring sonic ideas to fruition. But the production approach stays true to the original creative spirit, and entirely retains the DIY "homemade" B-movie approach of Outsider Art. 

Whether on cassette, or 8-track digital, or 24-tracks, the creating of “Low Budget / High Impact” art remains a guiding force: Like Jean-Luc Godard’s assertion that the new challenge of art is to create “a unity of politics and art, the unity of revolutionary content and artistic form,” these Do-It-Yourself ‘Homemade’ recordings are made with very rudimentary equipment, with more reliance on mind, hands & mouth than technology, on the stylishly pimp budget of a new used shoe, to provide these musical messages with form and strength of conviction; reflecting a personal process of living with soul, grace, and freedom in a complex material world, like a sonic notebook of ideas and experiences.

While this brand of sonic magic relies on traditional form - in this case classic rock & new wave electro "pop music" - there are hand-tailored elements throughout, using synthesizers to create unique sounds that we've not heard before, to match the lyrical content with the mood of the songs. A bit of sound painting. And while it's officially "electronic" music, it is very human and primitive. All instrumentation is played live in the recording, not looped or assigned, or played by a computer.

An additional & quite unexpected development in the galactic story-telling arc is that illustrated stories are replaced with a new talent, with broader communicative power: B-movie "music video" making. Here, Stavo's fascination with out of print or barely-ever released cult films comes into play with rewarding results; instead of embellishing song meaning with parallel short stories, he transmits meaning in bigger & more explicit form by assigning video images to expand on the lyrics. Providing a new context of meaning for short clips of previously released creations falls into 'fair use' (or "Interpolation Video") - and these new visual tools make inventive re-use of underground largely-ignored works, & show them off as brilliantly enjoyable, while also providing satisfying new connections in song interpretation and expression.

So despite the popular assertion in the media that there is "no more underground" due to the pervasiveness of the world wide web unearthing many into the mainstream, there are still -everywhere - people making art for their love of creation, outside the dealings of industry, of profound beauty. The underground is indeed far larger than the Popular Culture, and the stories of millions of lives far outweigh the few discussed & applauded in glossy magazines and industry internet platforms. These are the makers of the cult film, the champions of experimentation~ to play with loose elements & tinker with possibilities~ and those in cafes, passionately scribbling away in journals... These are things that comprise the shared galactic witchcraft between all creative people; incantations born of heartfelt investigation and unique fascinations and engagement.

At the 2018 New Mexico Music Awards, which annually celebrates work recorded in the state over the course of the year, the Galactic Witchcraft album “Fabric Statements” was the runner-up for Best Pop Album of the Year. 

Then in 2019, those earlier original 4-track consumer grade cassette recordings of Stavo Craft are digitally released as a 50-song anthology, "BE OTHER: The Alien Pirate Radio Broadcasts" which is a largely expanded & definitive volume from the initial CD/DVD 'Be Other' compendium. This 4-CD set features these stories from space, and themes of deprogramming and self-invention. And indeed, they are released FAR INTO THE FUTURE from the time when they were created.

The latest Galactic Witchcraft release, "It Came From The Skies!!!" entered into this world in early 2021. One of its songs, "The Game Show" was transformed a year later into a collaborative video installation project with art-world darlings Meow Wolf for their 'Convergence Station" permanent exhibition in Denver.  And two other songs from that recording ("Mystic" and "Jewels & Fur") were integrated as soundtrack songs for Stavo's first pulp fiction memoir, "Auto Antenna" released in the summer of 2023 on By The Muses Press.

This galactic story continues to unfold.....