The rational world dissolves into a chaotic soup of fakeness and disinformation. Surveillance is freedom. Conspiracy is knowledege. And politics is the plaything of “hyperleaders” : anarchic outsiders, who paradoxically leverage social media blitzkrieg into authoritarian power.
Artists turn to dystopian science fiction for, maybe solace, maybe a vocabulary to express their horror and bewilderment at the present-shock we hurtle through.
A new arrival to the Dionysian Industrial Complex is djalgoritmo, a live-coder working exclusively in Tidal Cycles, the state of the art music programming language hybrid of Haskell and SuperCollider. His beats are a glitched texture of hissing, deep throated gurgles, fluttering clatter and spectral choirs, punctuated by stabs of synth bass and 808s.
On this epic EP he tells a dark story in collaboration with established Dionysian Industrial artists Biophillick and euFräktus, The trio explore a nightmare world bricolaged from the exploded fragments of dark science fiction movies.
Biophillick, the “real” Biophillick, is a techno-shaman channelling the cosmic forces of nature. But what is a shaman to do when trapped in the bowels of Metropolis? In the torture chambers beneath Airstrip One, in the aftermath of yet another World War Terminus? This Biophillick, the Biophillick of }bio{borgs, wanders through an underworld of electric sheep, where Furbies and Pokemon must substitute for true animal familiars and Anchimayen. Indeed, we struggle to determine whether this “Biophillick”, his lyrics a free-associated thoughtstream of unravelling techno-babble, might not himself be a failing replicant.
Meanwhile, euFräktus, picks up a sitar, like a reanimated George Harrison, and is transmogrified and transubstantiated. He ascendeds to become cosmic drone, a black Om-sound, drenching the ruins with background radiation.
djalgoritmo’s beats become distorted, birdlike whoops and drums pulverized by reverb. Biophillick stops to converse with an atomic beetle, in all its Kafkaesque helplessness. A conversational sound-world of rasps and clicks and thunder and bursts of static. Overdubbed with Bio’s fat laments.
But is Bio engaging with nature? Or wantonly pulling the wings off another artificial lifeform?
A Nexus 6, tripping on melange, in the pursuit of “more life”, finds himself in a spice trance. Now the sitar becomes more driving. A riffing protagonist. Locking with djalgoritmo’s accelerating, half-dancing, half-military, beats, into a travelling groove. A cosmic escalator or space elevator lifting Bio on a last journey. Escape velocity from this flattened Earth to a wider universe, accompanied by Furby’s warbling and trilling song.
Away, beyond the Heaviside Layer. To Arrakis. To join djalgoritmo and euFräktus’s nomad war-machine in clairvoyant jihad against the drug-lords and trolls of social media. Bio becomes messiah. One day, he will return.
