11/15/22Galactapus was recently contacted with interview questions by Music Arena music blog. What follows are the answers to those questions.Galactapus Interview with Music Arena 11/15/22
What is your stage name?
Our collective stage name is Galactapus, our members have no stage names nor real names to offer you. Additionally, we don’t make stage appearances, we exist on record and sometimes film. And print I guess
Is there a story behind your stage name?
Half underwater, half intergalactic. Both areas underexplored
Where do you find inspiration?
Life’s poetry, the unlikelihood of two things occurring at the same time in the same place. The elements, the supernatural and the carnal.
What was the role of music in the early years of your life?
Transport. It created an alternate reality with its own smells and colors. A preferable wonderland
Are you from a musical or artistic family?
Aren’t we all artists and actors? In all honesty, as genetics go, I think I was born with no sense of rhythm or pitch, based upon my parent’s singing at church. It’s all been uphill
Who inspired you to be a part of the music industry?
I’m not sure Galactapus is part of the industry, but early memories include commercials, arcade music and tinkering on instruments around the house. Later, heavy metal helped us develop chops, then punk and such inspired us to lose those chops
Is there a story behind your stage name?
Half
How did you learn to sing/write/to play?
We’ve all come about it from different motivations and methods, and maintain different competencies. I think that’s a strength for a group
What was the first concert that you ever went to and who did you see perform?
Lots of cover bands. I don’t want to date Galactapus with specific concerts, begging your pardon
How could you describe your music?
We’ve been going with garage-prog lately, since no one else is using it. Music is its own thing. I’m hesitant to corrupt the music with too much verbiage, fearing it would negate the usefulness of it. Are we a frustratingly vague interview?
Describe your creative process.
Mostly always different. Sometimes I think we’ve exhausted every method, then a new idea pops in the side door. This usually come through synesthesia, which is to say in the form of colors, textures, smells and so forth. Temperatures. Sounds strange, but notes and beats come towards the tail end. At some point the song starts make the decisions
What is your main inspiration?
I guess the notion that we have an opportunity to add something of beauty in the world that wouldn’t have been there otherwise, unique to our efforts
What musician do you admire most and why?
Galactapus are avid music collectors, but extremely irreverent. The wonderful artists we adore, there’s tons of them and for every different reason under the sun
Did your style evolve since the beginning of your career?
Hopefully always. It’s hard for us to justify music that isn’t evolving. Repeating yourself is good for longevity, but that’s not a longevity we’d want. It would be better to just stop.
Who do you see as your main competitor?
We’re peaceful uncompetitive souls. If we knew who was doing music remotely similar, we would send them flowers and buy all their records
What are your interests outside of music?
Animals, mental health, art, cooking, lovemaking
If it wasn’t a music career, what would you be doing?
Most musicians, us included, don’t actually have music careers. We go to jobs, then throw money into a black hole to have the luxury of playing
What is the biggest problem you have encountered in the journey of music?
None specifically. Sometimes in life we’re misunderstood. That would happen with or without music.
If you could change one thing in the music industry, what would it be?
Have it publicly funded
Why did you choose this as the title of this project?
The Rainbows Of Wrong, our upcoming album, is about celebrating the vast and marvelous spectrum of failure, and making a lifestyle out of it
What are your plans for the coming months?
Gosh, sometimes it’s all we can muster to just get a day under our belt. We can only remain liquid and see what she brings to us
Do you have any artistic collaboration plans
No. We’ve designed our lives to be as insular as can be. We produce all our music, videos, photography and promotion within the Galactapus house.
What message would you like to give to your fans?
To stay tuned. Not to Galactapus necessarily, just to stay tuned, even when your instruments are out of tune.
2/22/22The increasingly famous Galactapus recently sat down for a chat with FVMusicBlog. What follows are the results:Music Interview: GALACTAPUS 21/2/22
We were lucky enough to catch up with Galactapus following the release of their post-punk single ‘Waking The Troll’. Enjoy our full interview with this unique and innovating band now!
Hi Galactapus, tell us about yourselves?
Galactapus is a nameless, faceless recording group hiding in plain sight. We have the luxury of a private sanctuary in the middle of the city, a safe place mentally, physically, creatively.
How we’re acquainted will have to remain a mystery I’m afraid. But all our music, film and artwork is produced and contained under this roof.
The music is so much more than therapeutic, it’s also religion. Tempered with silence though. Which is also religion.
Who influenced your latest release, ‘Waking The Troll’?
Galactapus are avid record collectors, but that doesn’t make us too special.
For ‘Waking The Troll’, the big influence was the birds in the back yard. We just set up mics, recorded them, then tried to let that navigate the composition.
The song has something to do with our morning ritual meditation of gratitude and neutralizing persistent panic. And it’s inspired by the feeling of home and the passing of the seasons, the tranquility, the nostalgia, tumult and terror that goes along with it.
At some point in the creative process, a song grows legs, starts walking and emitting aromas. We put meat on its bones, let it make the decisions, oblige by its whim.
We see ‘Waking The Troll’ is available on vinyl, why did you decide to print on vinyl?
Well, we had the notion that like-minded citizens of the world probably have vinyl collections, maybe they’d be the ones we should consider foremost. And the packaging is exciting for us as artists.
But I don’t really know who consumes music and how, or why, but give the good people a choice I guess.
Tell us about your LP, ‘I Intend To Stay’
Writers have liked words like strange, unique, new among more colorful ones. We hope so. We have to justify to ourselves that the music we release has a compelling reason to exist out in the wild. Seems like a low bar, but for us it’s a very high bar.
Singing in our songs is very important, the timbre of the human voice perks our ears up. It’s been that way since we first plop from the womb. But Galactapus has no lyrical content, hopefully that’s not a barrier for some.
You’ve probably heard all the words before anyway, or if not you probably will. But it won’t be Galactapus that tells you so. So divorced from language, we can get out of the cerebral forest and hit on some real ineffable feelings, which is our endeavor.
Some in Galactapus have the mixed blessing of synesthesia, when stimuli excite the wrong sensory pathway. So the album is the sound of colors and shapes, textures, certain voices… that sit together for a while and suggest something musical to us.
We try to be a unique conduit for the atmosphere’s floating detritus.
What’s your dream venue to play?
The answer maybe in your question. I think infiltrating people’s dreams could be the next natural setting. More personal and interactive, better for everyone involved.
Sometimes there’s bands playing in my dreams. A big blessing, because I can steal their songs when I wake up.
Other than music, what are you passionate about?
Animals, art, love-making, healing, cooking. All part of the greater body of work.
What changes would you like to see in the music business?
Oh, well, music is a noble pursuit. Music business is mostly the opposite of that. I suspect your reader’s wouldn’t be interested in a venomous tirade.
We’ll choose our battles, recognize our locus of control. To some extent now, musicians only need to involve themselves in the business as much as we can bear.
How do you feel about how the internet plays a role in today’s music business?
Twas a time you’d go to a store to see what’s new in music. Last year’s music had run its course, either sold out or returned. Presently though, us as consumers have the keys to the archive of the history of recorded music. Now, and all at once!
People don’t particularly care what’s old or new, and what anyone else’s social group is listening to.
So as musicians, the competition is now everybody who has ever recorded music. You can’t steal from old obscure artists anymore, an old trick of the trade, you’ll be quickly exposed. Well, these are all mostly good things for all involved.
What would it be if you could choose one thing for fans to take away from your music?
You know the moment, maybe when the world is asleep, where you hear a music that changes everything, and it feels like it’s all yours? Just an artist giving a personal gift to only you?
It’s probably happened to all of us. And the best part is no one can take that moment from you, they don’t even ever have to know about it.
The artist will probably never know what that moment meant to you. Well, I guess the romance of that moment, and the fact that we’ll never know about it, is our highest hope and inspiration.
What is your favourite song to play live?
Live performance is a bit of a summoning, a re-animation of a feeling. The song will choose Us at any given moment, and we need to be astute and ready to receive It, whenever it decides is the time.
That being said, we’re not currently performing for myriad reasons, and I’m not sure when that status might change.
Have you started working on your next release?
It’s about half in the bag. A new album means a new approach, per our mantra of making new music with a reason to exist. It’s tentatively called ‘The Rainbows Of Wrong’. Because at best, there’s only a handful of ways to do something right, but beautifully vast and varied ways of doing things wrong.
This is the natural habitat of Galactapus, in the wonderful wild of our imagination. I Intend To Stay resulted from a lot of slow-burning nebulous ideas on the range at all times. The new record will be more about capturing moments, and being a little more proactive in the pursuit. It’ll be another side of being in the present.
FVMusicBlog February 2022
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