That dream feels real to quirky D.C. pop duo The Galaxy Electric. The pair’s recent debut album, Everything Is Light And Sound, boasts a sweeping variety of mid-20th century synthesizers and recording techniques. Bassist/producer Augustus Green masterminds the robotic orchestra, playing sophisticated melodies punctuated by the bleeps and whooshes of various gadgets. Singer/keyboardist Jacqueline Caruso ties it all together with a mechanical sentimentality, like an android contemplating love.

The two describe their origins as if they were assembled in a factory.

“Our separate parts, combined together, made a greater whole,” the duo writes in an email, communicating as a single unit. “We fit. And we felt it. And it spurred us on to create together indefinitely.”

They explain their creative process in similar programming terms.

“It’s truly difficult to say whether an aspect of the songs are one person’s idea over the other,” the band writes. “It’s as though we are deciphering each song’s code from an invisible source and reverse-engineering them.”

The recording of Everything Is Light And Sound was mostly a painstaking DIY affair, the band says, but they also describe it as magical, and occasionally too exciting for their own good. For instance, the group tracked one of the songs after sneaking into a university multipurpose space.

“We didn’t know how long it would be before we got kicked out, so the pressure was on,” the band writes.

The Galaxy Electric complemented the album release with a video for closing track “Please Come Home Soon” (watch it above). Once again, they looked to old technology to make an artistic statement, shooting with 8mm film. The video features time-lapse footage of Maryland’s Wicomico River, where Green’s parents live. The camera distorts the images impressionistically in a tribute to French painter Claude Monet.

The video was Green’s personal project. Unlike his duo’s music, however, the process was far from exact.

“The thing is there is no viewfinder that shows you what you’re filming,” Green says. “I had to just guess — and to my surprise, it worked out.”

The Galaxy Electric plays July 11 at Galaxy Hut and July 22 at U Street Music Hall. 

Set List

• “Tearing Me Up”

Watch Bob Moses’ full performance at KCRW.com.

Copyright 2016 KCRW-FM. To see more, visit KCRW-FM.

He recently visited Bandwidth’s offsite studio, the Wilderness Bureau — and our goth jungle stage — to deliver a spirited performance of “Appeals” and “Sincere,” from his forthcoming debut record, Primitives. 

Subscribe to Bandwidth’s channel on YouTube, and don’t miss our awesome playlist of every Bandwidth session to date.

Outside of his music, Hoffman co-owns two bars that fit the theme: They’re called Galaxy Hut and Spacebar. (Disclosure: My husband works part-time at the latter.)

But for his latest release, Hoffman looked no further than his record collection. The song he recently posted on Bandcamp is called “Its Name Is Jonas.” Don’t get it? The serene and twinkling composition is a cover of Weezer’s “My Name Is Jonas,” renamed for the blizzard that buried much of the Eastern seaboard last weekend.

Consider making Aerialist’s “Its Name Is Jonas” the first track on your sidewalk-shoveling playlist.

Top photo by Flickr user Geoff Alexander used under a Creative Commons license.

Lary Hoffman of Aerialist

The 41-year-old resident of Falls Church has used the moniker Aerialist since 1997 for his eclectic instrumental output. When he’s not making music, he and his wife Erica are running two Virginia bars with a spacey motif: Galaxy Hut and Spacebar.

Aerialist has more in common with the shifting moods of a film score than a band with a clear-cut sound. Moon Patrol, Aerialist’s latest album, features sentimental melodies, aggressive riffs, gloomy ballads and beyond, all created with a rich palette of natural and synthesized tones that hark back to space-age eccentrics like Wendy Carlos and David Axelrod.

If Moon Patrol sounds out of this world, it’s intentional. According to Hoffman, the album is inspired by footage taken by the NASA New Horizons and Cassini space probes. He named the album’s songs after the various moons within our solar system.

“There were a lot of crucial moon encounters during this time period, and the moons had great names,” Hoffman says.

Moon Patrol collects Hoffman’s first set of Aerialist tracks since 2001, when a computer crash forced him to put his work on hold. After that, a busy life and career made it hard to rebound.

“For the majority of 2001 to 2014 I didn’t play music at all,” Hoffman says. At one point he attempted a “more rock” version of the project with a live drummer, but the lineup didn’t release any recordings. Hoffman finally returned to Aerialist last year.

“I started tediously composing music with a phone app,” Hoffman says. Then he upgraded to Ableton Live. Moon Patrol highlights this work as well as several updated versions of his songs from the ’90s.

Hoffman plans to blast off with more Aerialist material in 2016.

Recommended tracks: “Hydra,” “Triton,” “Thalassa” and “Proteus”

“Friday night!” the group bellows on the track. Their vocals sound overwrought; their synths sparkly. But this is no anthem for weekend warriors.

“It was a Friday night home invasion,” goes one verse. “Male, 6’2″ and Caucasian. Cause of death: strangulation.”

D.C.’s only murder tale to be paired with dance pop (in recent memory, anyway), “Friday Night” is giddily gruesome — and now it has an equally bizarre video, premiered on Bandwidth today.

Like the group’s earlier video for “New Empire,” the “Friday Night” visual is basically a potpourri of vintage footage, only this time, most of it looks pulled from the ’80s and ’90s. If the video has a main character, it’s a nuclear-green Pontiac Stinger — described by one YouTube user as “the most ridiculous concept/future car ever” — that cruises the beach dispensing sexy fun.

There’s not really a narrative here, though. Brutalism member Gavin Holland says he and bandmates Ben Bruno and Zach Carter just scoured the Internet for “the weirdest vintage yet action-oriented footage” they could get.

“Some of it is thematically relevant, but we also have imagery we just enjoy,” Holland writes, “like dudes surfing and ’90s robot CGI dinosaurs.”

Carter points out that while the video might seem random, it actually stems from Brutalism’s core philosophy.

“Brutalism has always believed that if you’re going to be murdered in your own home, you might as well go windsurfing first,” Carter writes. “We consider this a bedrock aesthetic principle.”

The 28-year-old D.C. native leads Color Palette, the electronic-rock outfit set to release its debut EP in August. The catchy “Heartless” (listen below) — which Nemeyer wrote and, with Kyle Downes, co-produced — is the EP’s second single, following up on “Seventeen.”

While it describes a particularly ruthless romantic partner, the tune is far from miserable; it’s accessible, sounding indebted to janglers R.E.M. and The Smiths, but without Michael Stipes’ ambiguity or Morrissey’s pretentiousness. In other words, it’s a sad song that doesn’t wallow.

“Heartless” seems to revel in the elasticity of youth — a time when emotions are vivid, reactions are uncalculated and your pain just might be healed by the end of that song. Got your heart stomped on? This track commands, “Dance it out.”

Maybe that’s why Color Palette is a band best enjoyed in the wild.

“I don’t think you can fully appreciate this music without seeing a show. We’re better live,” Nemeyer says. “Every time I’m up there singing a song, I’m reliving it all over again.”

Color Palette plays an EP release show July 25 at Rock & Roll Hotel with Drop Electric, Honest Haloway and Boon.

Turns out no — the electronic-pop tune is just about recording as a solo artist.

“I feel like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, just like, sitting here pressing all these buttons,” says Cruzie Beaux’s Kristina Reznikov, 28, who named the song after the classic film’s one-man band, Bert. (The misspelling of “Dyke” is intentional, she adds.)

“Mrs. Dick Van Dike” (listen below) sounds remix-ready, riding on the tempo of its piano hook and dipping into valleys of ambience. Mixed by Mat Leffler-Schulman of Mobtown Studios, its mellow vibe diverges from Reznikov’s relatively energetic first batch of songs, released as Demo 1. Though Reznikov worries she’s not sticking to her sound, the new track still unearths an uneasiness beneath her wailing vocals.

That tension might be familiar to fans of Reznikov’s previous work with Drop Electric. Reznikov left D.C. indie-rock band in mid-2014, but she says writing alone hasn’t been a difficult adjustment.

“It’s relaxing for me to sit in my room for five hours and play a beat,” Reznikov says.

Outside of a band, the songwriting process comes from the same place it always has: a compulsion to write. The Cleveland Park-based musician says her songwriting itch can get so powerful, it reaches “the point that even when I’m talking to people, I’m just thinking about a song that I’m writing,” she says. “It can get pretty annoying.”

If all goes according to plan, Cruzie Beaux will release her debut full-length this winter.

Cruzie Beaux plays Saturday at Fête De La Musique DC.

Watch as the Scots perform a stripped down version of “Sirens,” a standout from their latest full-length, White Men Are Black Men Too. The group followed that with a gorgeous a cappella version of “Only Child.”

Subscribe to Bandwidth’s channel on YouTube, and don’t miss our awesome playlist of every Bandwidth session to date.