Last week saw news of LA drummer Cobus Potgieter’s attempts to form a band over YouTube, raising $US 42,000 in just five days in the process of a plan that will see him forming a band over the internet before flying them to LA to record a debut album.
If you think that’s crazy, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Today comes news of another internet-based campaign whose music project is a little wider in scope and ambition.
Music Feeds reports that one Jim MacKenzie, is upping the ante on Potgeiter’s plan, the Asheville, North Carolina resident launching his own Kickstarter project, through an enterprising group called Stuff Monsters Like, to fund the recording of an album to be produced entirely on the Moon.
‘What is this lunar-cy?!’ you may well ask.
MacKenzie’s project, entitled Lunar Aid 1985 is attempting to raise over $US 21 million on the creative project website, to fund of a ‘space folk’ album that will be recorded, produced, mixed and mastered entirely on the Moon’s lunar surface.
“At the Stuff Monsters Like Haunted Mansion and Blog Laboratory, we have our heads in the clouds, and dream of reaching the stars,” begins MacKenzie’s Kickstarter pledge, “our big dream is to redefine the genre of space folk music… to make our music as authentic as possible, first, we must venture into space. Could Muddy Waters have written what he wrote without the Delta? Could Bob Dylan have written what he wrote without hopping trains?… That is why we have chosen the moon as the setting for our first great album.”
It may seem like MacKenzie and his group are tacking the mickey, but his batty descriptions of ‘building a moon base’ ‘are certainly entertaining, he’s also offering backers the chance to “move to a celestial body and start a new life. That’s amazing!”
Pledges for Lunar Aid 1985 start from just a single dollar, moving up through the ranks to include beneficiaries with “One Moon Acre” for a $20 donation, autographed copies of the complete album for $50 pledges, right up to a statue built in your honour among one of the Moon’s many craters for just $500 a pop. A bargain rate for intergalactic immortality.
As Mackenzie himself notes: “This is perhaps one of the biggest ideas ever proposed on Kickstarter.” It’s exorbitant $21 million sum is perhaps the most ambitious target the website has hosted in its existence,”so, by supporting it you are making Internet history,” explains MacKenzie’s Kickstarter project page. However, the website uses an ‘all or nothing’ scheme, which basically means that if the designated funding is not reached, then none of the money pledged towards a given project is cleared.
A recent update from Stuff Monsters Like suggests that the pressures of raising millions of dollars isn’t the only challenge the space folk album is facing, “Russia has announced they intend to build a permanent base on the moon. Well, Russia may want to go to the moon, but Stuff Monsters Like is the only one who can promise you that once we get to the moon, we’ll send back folk music.”
So far, funding for Lunar Aid 1985 has stalled at around $US 4,500 from just 27 backers, and with just under two weeks to go before its 30th of June deadline.
No word yet if the album is to feature a cover of “Eclipse”, the closing track of Pink Floy’d Dark Side Of The Moon; “The lunatic is on the grass…”
Watch the bizarre pitch below and decide if you want to be a part of space folk history:
