deja dystopia

from the FACT interview:

“It was definitely a conscious thing to combine the soundtrack stuff with club music... When we’re writing the aim is to ‘build’ a city with sound. It is a very Blade Runner, cyber punk, futuristic kind of thing.... A lot of the media we consume in terms of films, games, even music, is very sci-fi based."

Blade Runner - a reference point that is 34 years old

“We literally take from everything, video games, soundtracks. We’ll be sitting watching films, Alien, that kinda stuff, and it all comes together.”

Alien - released 1979. 37 years ago.


(I love the "everything" in that quote - the huge pancultural span from videogames to s.f. movie sound-tracks!)


Their interviewer Ben Murphy says:

"they create the kind of beats that would give William Gibson nightmares" 

Nightmares of Time coming to a standstill in 1984, the year of Neuromancer's publication, maybe!


I don't mean to be mean. I shouldn't pick on them really - because there's loads of others peddling the same kinda thing.

SRA are evidently skilled at what it is they're doing (weightless grime meets Metro Boomin meets Vangelis). It's just that the thing they're doing is rather over-subscribed.

And the larger point is: if you are trying to evoke phuture, you haven't a hope in Hades when the touchstones, the allusions, sound-textures, are all utterly deja vu, deja lu, deja entendu

Like the quote about the most extraordinary hacker in the history of cyberpunk at the start of this mix




These dystopian visions are so familar, they're cuddly at this point.