Transmission 1: Clock Radio, 1981
It was a late autumn Sunday in 1981. The kind of morning where you wake gently, already warm under thick blankets, with the faint smell of toast somewhere downstairs.
Rory was ten years old. The house wasn’t his — it belonged to a family he'd grown close to. It always felt safe for him here. Clock radios were a new thing then, and this one clicked to life right on 7:00 AM. Mechanical, exact.
A presenter’s voice drifted in, perfectly balanced in the static. Then the song began.
He didn’t know who it was. Still doesn’t. A glam voice, half-human, half-signal. Guitars that shimmered like solar flares. Lyrics that sounded like coordinates for another planet.
Rory lay there completely still, staring at the ceiling. It didn’t feel like music. It felt like a transmission — as if someone out there was reaching for him, quietly, through sound.
Years later, he would try to find that track again. He never did.
But something about that moment stayed. It lives in every moment of Dreams in Infrared — especially in the myth of a figure he dreamed up the following year: Ryden Nova. A glam-rock astronaut, tuning the dial on a dusty planet, waiting to be heard.
(More transmissions to follow...)