Moon Magnet: Keeping Denver Trippy

They’re cute, queer affirming, and decked out from head to toe in the trippiest of garbs. The Moon Magnet collective does it all; they’re a record label; they have a band; the members play in other bands, and they make art. They pop up at DJ nights around town, play shows, encourage local artists, and collaborate with art collectives like Meow Wolf.

We talked to Reed Fuchs of Moon Magnet about art, music, and everything the collective has been working on.

What has Moon Magnet been up to?

Moon Magnet Compilation Vol. 4 is the album we just came out with. The artist collective has been around since 2013, and we are a record label and recording studio first and foremost. We license music for film and television. The label has been a way to release friends’ music and get more ears on it. This will be our 17th release. It’s 20 songs, out on double cassette and on Spotify. There are mainly Denver artists on the label, but this release has some artists from L.A. too. It came out on July 27.

We’ve also been working on Moonhammer; that’s the label’s band, and it’s all made up of friends and collaborators.

That’s so cool! what have Moonhammer done so far?

Moonhammer have been more active than usual lately. We’ve been a band for about a year, and we usually improvise, but we have some songs online. We just released the soundtrack for this short film, Lily n Rose. It’s an 80s-style film, so we scored an 80s soundtrack to it, and we are releasing three songs on that compilation.

You’ve been doing some partnerships with art collective Meow Wolf. can you go into more detail about that?

We’ve done a range of things with Meow Wolf; De Collage, my other band, played there with Dan Deacon on Halloween two years ago, and we collaborated with their Christmas special.

We also want to try and get them into Balanced Breakfast, our music industry meetup that I’ve been helping to run for three years with the group Free Music for Free People. It started in San Francisco, and now they have 27 chapters in different cities.

Can you tell us more about Balanced Breakfast?

Every fourth Saturday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Mercury Cafe, we hold it for free. We do free meetups, and we have a different speaker every month, people from labels, publishing companies, non-profits, anything to do with the music industry. The best way to find out about it is the Facebook group; it’s called BB Denver. We’ve had so many amazing people that came in to speak, like we’ve had a lot of University of Colorado Denver professors from the program there; we’ve had Red Bull come in, Levitt Pavilion, Red Rocks, AEG. We hold informal discussions, conversations. The special guests lead it and give background on how they got where they are today.

What kind of visual art have you been working on?

Two years ago, I got into making installations; the whole Moon Magnet crew did. We make installations for different events, really shiny mylar space blankets and googly eyes. We did one at Desert Days last year; it’s a big psych rock festival kind of like Austin Psych Fest in Joshua Tree. We got to work with Adult Swim; we got to make three huge milar pyramids for people to watch Adult Swim all day at the festival, and hang out in these pyramids where there was air conditioning and teddy bears. We are doing that again this year, doing another installation there, and then probably we are doing an installation at Denver Psych Fest, a festival that I helped run a few years ago, which is now just doing little micro-events.

Whatever happened to Denver Psych Fest? Is it coming back?

We usually call it Synesthesia, and there will be another big one next summer, but this summer it was a part of Underground Music Showcase.

Tell us about your recent DJing at Blush & Blu.

I’ve been DJing for two years; last year I started DJing with Kitty Crimes at Blush & Blu. Blush is one of my favorite spots; they’ve been some of the most fun events that I’ve DJed, too, and I have a night coming up there soon, but it’s not officially announced yet.

What other cool stuff do you have going on?

Moon Magnet  had a residency for five years where we throw shows every month at Alamo Drafthouse. We get to book a band, and then the band chooses whatever movie they want; for our next one we are gonna premiere Season One of our surreal reality TV show, Cosmic Pineapple.

Whoa, you have a TV show too?

Yep, it’s been done for two years; it’s just pretty much Cosmic Pineapple, the biggest band in the cosmoverse, and musician Sun Rah shows them the cosmic touring circuit. It begins with a synth battle with Satan. Eventually we are going to premier it at Alamo.

That’s amazing. Anything else to announce?

There are gonna be a lot of new singles coming out too; we decided instead of just trying to release an album, because that’s too much pressure, to just release a bunch of singles every two weeks, and it’s far more exciting for me. That way we can share more music more often. There will also be a lot more Moon Magnet compilations. Our first one was a mixtape; our second one was on CD, and the third one was on vinyl. This one is on cassette, so I don’t know what the next one is gonna be on.

We’ve also been passing out stems to our new singles so that people can remix them, and we’ve received probably like eight remixes of De Collage songs. A lot of them are house remixes, and I’m obsessed with house music. I’m thinking we will kind of release them one at a time, because that way we can have a bunch of music coming out at once.

For more info on what Moon Magnet is up to, follow them @MoonMagnetStudios on Facebook or visit MoonMagnetMusic.com