If you feel like you’ve been living on an alien planet as of late, make no mistake: You’re not alone. All the cosmic alignments are in tragic disarray, you can’t go one minute without feeling like kicking something, and there’s chaos in the White House. For those who’ve felt a little out-of-body, there might not be a better environment to feel at one with like-minded intergalactic mutants than Bunk Bar this Thursday, February 23 for retro-wave flag-bearer Earth World as he takes the blips and bloops to the stratosphere and back.
Ray Rude, brainchild behind the project, is a familiar face to Portlanders as the drummer and keyboardist for The Builders and the Butchers, as well as for his chiptunes project Operation:Mission. Rude conceptualized Earth World a few years ago as a means to stay busy musically while the Butchers wound down their regular touring regimen, unveiling a cornucopic sense of adventure in his compositions. Enraptured as they are with melodic synths and sinister electro rhythms, the project enjoys a full-band treatment in the live setting (Paul Seely on drums and Jerry Nelson on guitar), leaving Rude room to parlay a string of trippy vocal runs dripping with harmonic undulation, as heard on tunes like “Stars in Your Arms”—listen below.
In honor of the band performing “Watch It Grow” from their 2015 self-titled debut for the very first time at the Bunk show, check out this interplanetary mind-meld of a video below using thousands of free images from NASA’s Apollo Archive moon missions (and also possibly free images of Hamm’s tallboys).
