In September, local animator and electronic musician Vox Mod (also of Lazer Kitty) sets his encyclopedia sci-fi knowledge loose on a mystery title. Fans have detected influences as far ranging as the ‘90s cartoon Aeon Flux, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Jean Giraud’s oil paintings in Vox Mod’s hypnotically cinematic albums and EPs.

Looking for insight into which film he’s choosing? Think Japanese, think dystopian future, think canonical anime influence.  “Because science-fiction films are my main inspiration, each album or record I have made is really the soundtrack for a movie I did not make,” he said.

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“One of the few local artists who has made science fiction that is not reflexive and actually looks forward is Vox Mod. This producer/musician/futurist has released five LPs/EPs under his name, is the drummer in the space-rock band Lazer Kitty, and recently collaborated with RA Scion on Shaper Tool; Bigger Weapon. He is about the production of a science fiction that is on the horizon of our point in time. Meaning, he is not a collector of the retro future, he is about the future of our city space and the future of our outer space—planets, starships, astronauts, and glittering rings of Saturn. He makes music with the design of transporting us to a civilization that has the technology to colonize the moons of Jupiter. In his music, we feel the blazing trail of a comet passing a spaceship, we enter a gas cloud that’s a nursery for newborn stars, or we see the sunset on an urbanscape that has no end and no beginning, and from parts of which dark rockets are regularly launched into the thinning twilight. Vox Mod’s music is big, bold, vast, and fearless. Are these not the noble attributes of a race of humans who have left the familiar and ancient rhythms of the spinning planet, the seasons, the orbit of our star for the great unknown?”

—Charles Mudede, The Stranger