Synopsis
A lone astronaut drifts through a retro-futurist cosmos rendered in hazy VHS textures and saturated color. The journey moves between star fields, glowing planets, orbital rings and abstract celestial forms, creating the sensation of a space mission unfolding inside a half-remembered television broadcast. Rather than presenting a conventional storyline, the video uses its images as an atmospheric counterpart to the song's melancholy: isolation, distance and emotional uncertainty become a colorful cosmic voyage. The result feels like a fragment from a lost science-fiction serial.
Factoids & Trivia
- The video forms Part 2 of the *Supermelodic Pulp* series, a project built around giving the EP's songs science-fiction-themed visual companions.
- Its visual identity deliberately evokes retro science fiction and degraded VHS footage, with soft focus, analog-looking noise, bright color shifts and vintage-style space imagery.
- The video was presented online in September 2012, shortly before the release of *Supermelodic Pulp*, Astronauts, etc.'s five-track debut EP.
- "Mystery Colors" was the first single associated with the EP. The track runs for just under four minutes and combines distant synth figures, organ tones and Anthony Ferraro's high, plaintive vocals.
- Ferraro had originally been pursuing classical piano studies at Berkeley. Arthritis made that path more difficult and helped push him toward electronic music, the direction represented by Astronauts, etc.
- The song's emotional theme and the video's imagery operate in parallel: the lyrics describe betrayal and isolation, while the astronaut imagery turns those feelings into literal distance and drifting through space.