Starcadian :: Dreams captured in waveforms

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Through his retro-futuristic alter ego Starcadian, George Smaragdis transformed memory into music—channeling the faded glow of 80s analog culture into vivid, cinematic soundscapes. With every synth line, he rewound time, crafting not just songs, but immersive “ear movies” where disco, sci-fi, and nostalgia collided. What began as a creative spark shared between friends became a cult-favorite legacy—one that continues to resonate with warmth, wonder, and interstellar groove.

“I make ear movies.”

Not many objects can act as a trigger for unfolding the 80s nostalgia as a floppy disk or a cassette tape. Both are for many of us mythical almost objects that encapsulate all the dust, the grain but also the fantasy, the utopia and the extra/ultra-ordinary travel across galaxies. In each turn, the 80s children can vividly re-enact every analog moment of favorite songs, movies, actors, fascinations, horrors, sci-fi ruminations, 8-bit game consoles and the deep energy of curious discoveries across culture and the network of connections through analog media to the rest of the world and beyond.

That lost decade is rediscovered and reimagined through ”synthwave” a niche genre of electronic music that hosts under its sunset blood umbrella a million of retro enthusiasts, bedroom musicians and nostalgic music producers but also collectors, aficionados and 80s curious listeners who are willing to dig through its thick net of references that impacted in an imaginative and long-lasting way the collective memory of listeners, producers and the whole of the entertainment industry.

My personal path of discovery of this genre came very surprisingly through a tattoo on the arm of an old schoolmate and close friend, the late George Smaragdis. A cassette tape or something reminiscent of it was, as he had explained to me, the creative logo for Starcadian, his new back then music alias. The image was very dense with memories and familiar textures as was his creative name. We both grew up in the small seaside town of Chania in Crete during the 80 and 90s, fully immersed in the cultural innovations of VHS, color tv, cassette players and the goosebumps and thrills of the movies of George Lucas and John Carpenter, Friday the 13th and Α Νightmare on Elm Street, Escape from New York, Flight of the Navigator, or Back to the Future. In our often parallel worlds, we surely spent many hours loading floppy disks containing video games onto Commodore and listening to vinyl record collections and cassette tapes of our older family members.

Within the inner workings of listenership ::

Since our schooldays, our paths crossed two more times: as members of a band rehearsing non-stop Marilyn Manson’s cover of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” until perfection. George was into Rock and Heavy Metal as many people in our home town these days. Music was in a way our point of connection although from different entry points and pathways. Many years later we reunited in NY sharing outings in festivals, concerts and beer gardens, chatting about music, recording, mixing and DAWs. Witnessing George’s humorous and exhilarating opinions about the topics of his passion was fascinating. He had a skillful and clever understanding of how the industry and the technology of creating, crafting and producing were embedded within the inner workings of listenership.

Around 2011-2012, he shared with us some demo tracks of Starcadian, his new synth-based project merging disco, electro, soul, funk, 80s synthpop with the atmosphere of retro movie soundtracks, perhaps George’s own response to the retro revival that followed after the release of the movie Drive. If I can recall well we listened to some early versions of Stg. Tagowski and Heart and let me tell you, it was a mind-blowing experience making our innermost memory veins vibrate deeply! His first album entitled Sunset Blood was released in 2013 and was composed, performed, produced by George himself and of course was an instant success in the Synthwave community, with which George didn’t have any connections.

In one of his interviews, George stated that “Everyone ‘gotta find the craft that gives them purpose.” (NightrideFM, Starcadian Interview: Artist Spotlight, 2019) and Starcadian was George’s own starship for interstellar travel, his midnight superhero territory, his passion project, his offering of beauty and mystery to the world. One cannot fully grasp the craftsmanship behind each one of his tracks but also how intelligently and profoundly his work has developed over the years whilst establishing his unique and trademark sound, an amalgam of influences defying any genre classification.

Saturdaze, released in 2014 as an accompaniment to Sunset Blood, escalates the fascination with 80s morning TV with stellar gems such as “Dance of Die” or “Entoptica” and installs George’s syncopated, groovy, soulful and elaborate synth sound by forming a very coherent package blending music, artwork and mystery as George begins to shape the Starcadian persona by shadowing his face with a hood and a hologram mask.

Being a CG/3D animation director during his daytime job, George was able to create a series of beautiful videos for the majority of his musical work. Here it must be noted that George had designed, directed and produced a series of wonderful animated films prior to his musical career for which he also composed the soundtracks. Extremely talented and hypercreative, George transformed all his instant passions, his childhood wonders, visions and favorite places to art. In one of his early animation movies he used as a point of inspiration, as he had told me, the beach of Stavros in Chania and the peculiarities of its geomorphology. This same beach reappears in the beautiful video for his track titled “Satellites” (Radio Galaxy, 2021) which he shot using a drone his father had given him as a birthday present a few years before. That would be the first time he would use it after his fathers passing, as he had told me during the fall of 2021.

Although being a citizen of the world, George always kept Greece and Crete very close to his heart and this is apparent in the titles of some his songs as in “New Cydonia” (Midnight Signals 2017), referring indirectly perhaps to the Nea Kydonia region in Chania but also in the Cydonia region on planet Mars where a “face” can be seen on the surface. This face has a cunning resemblance to Starcadian’s hologram mask which is of course based on George’s own face. The name Starcadian can perhaps elusively echo Arkadi or Arcadia in Greece but also numerous other references. Beyond that, George’s audiovisual language is immediately accessible and relatable. In his short-film titled Freak Night we can surely feel at home with what is at stake with the pizza delivery girl. His video clip for “Chinatown” strikes an instant VHS nostalgia chord.

Midnight Signals: Part I, released in 2017, is perhaps Starcadian’s second full-length release containing a very clever and funky set of compositions, alluding to the inherent tropes of the industry:

Wear a glowing mask
Cause baby I’m a hack yeah
Everything is retro
Got to double-bag yeah

Got no motivation
Live off compilations
Rap collaboration
For all the radio stations

Gotta get that extra content
Thumbs up is paying my rent
Don’t care about the music
Just using and abusing
(FAMVS, Midnight Signals, 2017)

And this is perhaps enough to say that Smargdis’s “synthwave” is deep, dense and strangely or even paradoxically authentic in its echoing of the 80s nostalgia and retro feel. Each song on Midnight Signals is epic in its own way, expanding and generous, funny and glittering just as George was as a person. Pieces like “Interspace,” “Night Games,” or “New Cydonia” have very profound lyrics that connect us with George’s very personal and reverberant space of rhythm, poetry and imagination. Tracks like “Freak Night” or “Polyanna” pay homage to genre defying legends like Prince or Peter Gabriel. In George’s own words: “Every song is a love letter to every idol that passed away,” referring to the artists that inspired the sound of the album, many of which had passed away around 2015-2016.“ (NightrideFM, Starcadian Interview: Artist Spotlight, 2019)

Similarly, in the following releases, most of them self-released, we follow his thread across various experiments in song-forms, effortless genre-hoping but also meticulous passion crafting, capturing dreams in waveforms, one song at a time. Each album, each song has a very clear storyline behind it, a movie-script almost. Smaragdi’s own moto “I make ear movies” justifies his clarity of craftsmanship, the understanding of the technical hierarchies of making, most of which he discovered by trial and error, eschewing formal training.

“In one of my idiot savant moments, I decided not to pursue formal training and thrive in the mystery of figuring it out myself and find my happy mistakes. It took a long time, but I think the initial lack of formal training shaped my concept of music as something unstructured, untamed and abstract, able to aesthetically change at a moment’s notice.”

“Like a dream captured in waveforms.” (Starcadian: Making Movies for your ears, Arturia.com)

This thread was suddenly cut on Thursday May 1st in the morning, when George was unexpectedly run over a truck while riding his bike across Broome and Centre Streets in Soho, NY.

George, you will be deeply missed but your soulful and captivating music will stay here with us, transmitting waves of interspace magic on earth. We’ll always be listening.