Darth Mojo says:

To help celebrate composer Stu Philips' upcoming 80th birthday, Southern California's most lavish movie palace, the Warner Grand, is throwing a party! Great music is a must if you really want to make a party swing, so the theater's house band will be busting out extended suites from some of Stu's most popular work, including the scores of Knight Rider, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Battlestar Galactica.

In this case, the "house band" is the Golden State Pops Orchestra, and the band leader will be none other than Mr. Philips himself!

Want an amazing evening of musical geekery?

Find out more via Darth Mojo (thanks Mojo!)

It's not terribly hard to find an overlap between science fiction and new tunes in this digital age, with bands throwing out synth beats, blips and laser light shows left and right. We've talked about how Alien Princess Rihanna and her lady-in-waiting GaGa have gotten in on the action, along with Felicia Day and Janet Jackson.

But we wanted to point out a few new videos worth noting that you may have missed over the hot summer months. Here are the best new music videos that include, but are not limited to, extreme displays of wormholes, swirling cosmic vistas, holograms, psychedelia and 1980s revivalism. Feel free to add your favorites so far this year as well.

First up let's talk about that song competition over at Buzz Grinder. If you can write and record a song about Admiral Ackbar and puppies you can win:

• free shirts
• CDs
• Records
• Hand Made Crochet Cupcakes
• and 4 Cents

Represent, readers — this a worthy challenge, because puppies and Ackbar are an awesome, yet unlikely, combination. It's not a trap!

"Black Swan" by Sunset Rubdown

In this first video from their new album Dragonslayer, the tirelessly creative and cryptic Canadian outfit gives us a video complete with futuristic landscapes, shooting stars, Rorshach inkblot tests, skeletons in outer space and lead singer Spencer Krug's signature warbling melodies.

"Tooth Decay" by Black Moth Super Rainbow

A cartoon skull drifts out of the troposphere in an endless trajectory past winged beasts and space cities as psychadelic synths and vocoders mesh, in the weirdly startling way only BMSR can do it.
"For the Planet Pluto" by The Music Tapes

Indie rock loves the underdog, so who better than the Music Tapes (and a ragtag group of local youngsters) to eulogize the poor demoted planetoid in this video, complete with a walking painting of Pluto, a grumpy astronomer and a support group for obsolete scientific objects?
"Do You" by Portugal The Man

"Do You" get creeped out by Portugal's zombie face operation table? Did not see this trippy space-surgery video getting paired with the wavy guitar of "Do You"? Aw look, he's got space sand in his ballet flat.
"Standing on the Shore" by Empire of the Sun

Empire Of The Sun isn't exactly our favorite band, but this August video is worthy of attention, for the swordfish girls alone. That said, their latest music video release Without You is channeling Labyrinth-era Bowie a bit too hard. Still we love those blue ladies, and the fever dreams that they haunt.

"Basic Space" The xx

With plodding electro beats, a bored, slightly lisping female singer, and chiaroscuro shots of the band members are saved by the weird tricks of light that make band members look like human incarnations of the Tron lightcycle.

"Automatic" by Tokio Hotel

The German Rock group forces together Mad Max and The Transformers — yes, the bad rip-off movie — for their latest video. I can't find an embeddable youtube, but really that's okay, because the best part is the HUMANOID ring the main character is sporting in the futuristic wasteland, and the big robot kiss in the end, pictured here.

"Kids" by MGMT

Sure it's a bit old, and a lot bit played out, and I'm not the biggest MGMT fan at all, but this video is undeniably rad. Whether it's creepy puppets gyrating in front of Windows 98 screensaver-worthy backgrounds, animation that looks like it was drawn by the creators of Jem and the Holograms, or definite evidence of baby harassment, it's pretty spectacular to watch. Plus monsters making babies cry will always bring a smile to our shriveled hearts.

"The Open Happiness" by Cee-lo

I want to live in Cee-lo's world, where everyone can play with spotted elephants and singing zebra people.

"Mirror Error" by The Faint

I thought I liked The Faint a lot way back in high school. I still can't figure out why. They're pretty much up to their old tricks in this video, but at least they're consistent, with their affection for collage techniques both in their music and visuals and their penchant for darkness, distortion and assembly-line imagery.

P-Funk featured so many science fiction elements, from the Mothership and the Clones of Funkenstein to "Atomic Dog." Where did the science fiction themes in P-Funk music come from?

To my knowledge, the early P-Funk scifi themes grew out of George and Bootsy's reported encounter with a UFO, somewhere out in the forest. I have no idea what they were doing in the forest but they have said that the encounter was so close, that it would have a lasting effect on them both. Of course, most of us musicians have either seen or been a UFO at some point in time during our careers, so a bit of sci-fi is bound to influence us.The Parliament-Funkadelic stage show in the 1970s was super elaborate, with the Mothership landing and the giant skull and lots of weird costumes. Did you guys think of it as creating a scifi opera on stage?

In my opinion, the whole P-Funk stage show could be considered as the first mash-up, with many different concepts mixed in... outta space... outer space... skull rock... pop-gun funk... a few cloned meat loaf-isms and even some sexy underwater-underwear mishaps. It was quite an event to behold and to be a part of. I guess you could say "everything plus the kitchen sink" but the science fictional aspects seemed to impact and stay with our fans the most, throughout the years.

A lot of your late 70s songs, like "Musical Son," "Theme From The Black Hole" and "(Not Just) Knee Deep," have totally infectious synth hooks. Were you trying for a science-fictional sound?

As far as my creations, "Musical Son" and "(Not Just) Knee Deep" were concerned, I would consider these songs to be based more on sci-fact, plotted against a grid that utilized my roots in Deep Funk/Jazz and Gospel. My guess is that the main reason the synth hooks sounded so different and futuristic was because the Moog gave an other-worldly vibe to what was mostly, up until then, a soundscape formed and upheld by non-fluidic aspects of analogue-esq instru-mentality. As such, there was very little fiction involved; it was really happening! Anyway, I always thought of a sci-fi synth sound to be more Theremin-like... perhaps something you would hear on Forbidden Planet or somewhat like the ARP sound from [the Ohio Players track] "The Funky Worm".

What made you decide to go all electronic with 1984's Evacuate Your Seats? Were you influenced by European techno music of that time?

I was compelled to make the project electronic. Evacuate Your Seats was happening for me, at the perfect time and represented the best opportunity for trying something different. I have never liked the idea of saying "this is my sound and I'm sticking with it". So, Evacuate caught me at a time when massive samplers were first being built and the Synclavier was the weapon of choice for any serious experimental keyboardist. Just check out some of the Zappa stuff.

These instruments were big, bulky and very expensive at that time. Case in point, a $10,000 sampler would only hold one 10 second sample so I had to use 15 of those devices for the Evacuate album. My Synclavier was another expensive monster and also used on the project.

To me, Evacuate did not sound like a European techno record. Maybe some might disagree, although I did like what the Europeans were doing with their music during that time. Evacuate occurred as a product of my own "new direction" into algorithmic sound and (simulated) computer sequencing. I say simulated because at the time of the recording, none of the gear would sync up together so most of the tracks had to be played and chopped up by hand.

Do you feel like you influenced today's electronic musicians?

I would like to think that there are some musicians who were and are still influenced by my electronics and synth work, aside from the rappers who used samples of my work.

For instance, since Evacuate was recorded in Detroit and was being played there quite a bit by DJs like The Electrifying Mojo, I did begin to see lots of youngsters catching on to the sound, some went on to become influential "musicians" in their own right and a style called Detroit Techno evolved soon afterwards. Perhaps there was some influence there, from Evacuate tracks like "Techno Freqs" and "Stick It In" but I can't say for sure.

What made you decide to start your own social networking site at iamnation.com?

By night-light, I have no choice but to become a super-mad funkateer with a half cape and a half-fro, so I guess you could say that IamNation is one of my respectable "digitized daytime job-style hobbies". IamNation is one of those internet projects that I've always wanted to create... especially since I caught wind of Livejournal a couple of years ago.

At the moment, membership at IamNation is by invitation only and just a few friends and I are using it for posting and messaging back and forth. One of the most famous of those friends is the fantastic P-Funk artist, Overton Loyd. Overton is also a contributer to the design of IamNation.

IamNation has recently turned 2 and I have now completed the forth upgrade to the system, so our members are just beginning to migrate over to the new site. I am also considering opening up a membership tier to the public, in the near future.