We’re big on fictional dystopias in my time. Maybe this is down to some warped, Freudian impulse or maybe it’s just plain, old human boredom manifesting itself in decadent, thrill-seeking fantasy. In any case, I’m pleased to report that Blade Runner 2049 just got propped-up by Blade Runner Black Out 2022, an Anime short-film made as a prequel to the main event, scored by Flying Lotus with music by the illustrious Kuedo. Watch the whole thing here.
With 2049 weighed down by mounting soundtrack complications, this expansive cyberpunk gem directed by Cowboy Bebop creator Shinichiro Watanabe is a breath of fresh, wide-eyed replicant air in the increasingly cynical human media racket surrounding the new Blade Runner movie.
Who knows, Blade Runner 2049 might still be great. But this tight, little short packing deliciously melancholy Anime-noir is kind of amazing. Denis Villeneuve needs to stay at the top his game to keep up with Blade Runner Black Out 2022.
As 2017 marches on relentlessly, providing shock, awe, frustration and disbelief in equal, abrupt measure, Regular Joes like me are left in the dark as to what kind of world we’re entering. The nature of truth seems to be in a state of flux. In the age of social media, it’s clear that the age-old axiom: ‘there’s two sides to every story’ is becoming increasingly irrelevant on an interconnected planet where people are flocking, fugue-like, to the internet to give their two cents on anything from a man getting kicked off a plane to Trump’s intervention in Syria.
Adding to that, powerful and persuasive propaganda machinery is working overtime to sway the hearts and minds of the global population, creating more confusion, less transparency and a consistent blurring of reality. There isn’t necessarily two sides to a story; there’s around three billion of them – all piled up on Facebook Twitter, Instagram, etc., in angry, sad, elated, euphoric and ultimately conflicting, little soundbites empowered by technology.
A strategy of coming to terms with this overwhelming, new uncertainty and its byproducts of paranoia, anxiety, apathy and moodswings, is attempting to grasp the elusive, incomprehensible hyperobjects governing our reality, so that they can be expressed, communicated and felt in immediate, comprehensible ways. Condensing your reaction into music is one way of going about this. What’s more, not only does music resonate and speak to the visceral complexities of the present, it has the added benefit of hinting at the future, as French theorist, Jacques Attali, so boldly points out in his book: Noise: The Political Economy of Music:
‘Music, an immaterial pleasure turned commodity, now heralds a society of the sign, of the immaterial up for sale, of the social relation unified in money. It heralds, for it is prophetic. It has always been in its essence a herald of times to come. Thus, as we shall see, if it is true that the political organization of the twentieth century is rooted in the political thought of the nineteenth, the latter is almost entirely present in embryonic form in the music of the eighteenth century.‘
In the attempt to traverse the insurmountable barrier of time and communicate with you in a language you’ll experience more directly, the language of music and emotion, we’ve compiled a playlist that echoes the tumultuous now while potentially hinting at things to come.
Obviously, a list directed at you guys living a hundred years from now, needs to be edgy and forward-thinking AF (Translation: As Fuck), which is why I’ve enlisted the help of my good, knowing and capable friend Tobias who DJs and also works at Vice, a company specializing in being down with the cutting-edge kids and their next-generation-shenanigans.
So, from the downcast soundcapes of Kuedo, Sd Laika and Actress to the grand lamentations of Arca and the frenzied, celestial trance of Lorenzo Senni, we hope you’ll dig the Letters to 2120 selection when you have a minute to disengage yourself from whatever futuristic activity you’re currently involved in.
Letters to 2120 