We ran out of fuel before we could reach space. Our crops were ravaged by mutant plagues. We are at war against the invisible, frontiers between paranoid nations turned into scorched no man’s lands patrolled by death squads on a prophylactic mission. We have regressed to the days before the Industrial Revolution, cheap labour and animals providing the energy that we need to keep the economy going. We live in the contraction. It’s a slower world. You can hear it in the music, in the night clubs of Bangkok illuminated by phosphorescent slugs under which illegal wind up girls dance languorously amongst pillars of opium smoke, to the syrupy rhythm of pop tunes produced following strict energy conservation principles, our musicians can’t speed forwards so they extend sideways. We nod in intoxicated reverie, perhaps it has all been for the best.

(Paolo Bacigalupi’s ‘The Wind Up Girl’ won this year’s Hugo Award. You should read it.)

Hype Williams-Rescue Dawn III

Hype Williams are an ebony cypher leaning subliminally over the underground’s sludgy quagmire, in a league of their own away from the morbid efforts of the drag empire. We have been delving in and out of their most recent Do Roids and Kill Everything 7”, in semi-comatose convalescence as our circadian rhythms recover from the blow of the transitions between their low gravity voodoo habitat and normality. Say, Rescue Dawn III. It sounds like soul butter spread over Chicago’s psycho-geography, dub bridges connecting the space-time shard of chi-house primitivism with a pulsating Rorschach cloud where juke shadows work their feet in the midst of a stroboscopic storm. Worth the shock.

Project Moore’s Law into infinity: storage space and processing power enough to contain a human consciousness. Add nano-machines to reproduce it into the flesh. It is then when software becomes the essence, and wetware an illusion, death, ageing and conventional physical considerations rendered null. Same for diseases, save for those that afflict software, ergo, the mysterious censorship virus which infected the A-gates through which we actualise ourselves and travel, selectively erasing bits of our memory, imploding the Republic of Is into warring fiefs, Billions died, history became zero, followed by a question mark.  We listen to the musics of those forgotten centuries in wonder, searching for insights into what the humans of the dark ages felt as technology pulled their souls into the gravity well of the accelerated now.

(Charles Stross’ Glasshouse is a classic of modern sci fi, we have only scratched the surface of its mindblowing vision in the blurb above)

DMX Krew- Mr. Blue

Perhaps with hope and exhilaration? One surely would think so after skating through the magnificent LED avenues of Wave Funk, the latest output from the labs of the synthomancer himself, EDMX of DMX Krew fame, as released by Rephlex. This is a double CD which covers all the bases, from meditative electroacustics to UR style psychedelic metropolis jams, odd borg skanking and out-takes from what should have been the soundtrack for Ghosts of Mars. And boogie, of course, lots of boogie with a pixelated nod to Jaco Pastorius and Harold Faltenmeyer, as exemplified by the wonderfully humoured Mr. Blue, fantastic theme tune for a Geekoramic ‘Tomorrow’s World’ re-enactement as presented by a LSD  rendition of Sir Clive Sinclair and Data General Computers all-star breakdancing squad.