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All
the First Contact music is original composition by Stuart
Barton and Jon Storm,
copyright ©2016 and 2022, all rights reserved.
All the tracks were written, performed and produced by Stuart and Jon. Who played what varies, but the guitars and drums are mostly Stuart, and the synths are mostly Jon.
On Dawning Star the singers are Jenny Lesle and Matthew Poon, with acting by Jon, Stuart and Julie Barton.
On the First Contact album, the singers are Robert Matthews, Jenny Lesle, and Brendan Quinn.
Stuart was the founder and main songwriter of the brilliant, late lamented ANOMIE, and is the drummer and chief organiser for the outstanding Soul Thief. Robert Matthews is also a member of Soul Thief, as lead singer and bassist.
Jon Storm has been making music with computers and synthesizers since
waaaaay back, starting when most computers didn't 
have even a basic soundcard unless you put it in yourself, and synths were
still chunky bits of hardware rather than software. He uses the excellent
Ableton Live in his studio,
which is based on a Windows PC, and Omnisphere.
Stuart's studio is Apple Mac based, using Logik Audio. Which is almost completely incompatible with Jon's studio, but we got around this by exchanging MP3s, wavs and aifs via Dropbox.
First Contact started as an idea for a jam, to christen Jon's new studio based on Live, and First Contact the track was written that night. It became the title track and a concept, kept giving us ideas, and just grew and grew. After a while, we noticed that it had grown into what used to be called a double album, so we decided to finish it off and release it. Then we started to think what might happen when Steve, now a sentient planet, got back to Earth, and that eventually became Dawning Star.
When we released First Contact we decided to create videos for a couple of tracks, for publicity purposes. Just like the music, that idea ballooned out of control until we had created video for all the tracks on the first album, and that became our YouTube channel. We borrowed bits from a lot of places, but we would particularly like to mention :
NASA and the Cassini Orbiter, which took all the best pictures of Saturn and its rings and moons
The Electric Sheep project with their fabulous fractals, artwork by Scott Draves and the Electric Sheep
The Saturn 3D screensaver from FP Software Labs, now sadly defunct.
Adobe Premiere Elements and Adobe Premiere Pro. Some of the videos were created in Premiere Elements, some in its big brother.
Website by Jon Storm