20jazzfunkgreats has been navigating the bug-ridden hills of the Mojave Desert over the last couple of weeks, armed with decomposed weaponry and loose evolutionary morals. It is a mesmerising experience, not least because of the retrofuturistic visuals and hallucinatory glitches that unfold in front of our predatory avatar, Juan Vasquez.

We scan the landscape from the scope of our sniper rifle to see it reassembling in front of our eyes as if a God hung-over on radioactive Wild Turkey was laying down the board for some dystopian battle chess, textures pop like some clichéd acid trip, or the collateral damage of poorly optimised C++ code. The obfuscated Artificial Intelligence operates in a limbo of defective path seeking and irrational dialogue trees, Freeside feral children thank us for blowing up a giant Rat days after we done the deed, informants anticipate telepathically a kidnapping investigation we have yet to get under way.

And then there’s the music, the nuclear holocaust has left Nevada with but three radio stations that seem to play the same trio of songs in a loop. Johnny Guitar, something about the unforgiving ranger that shot everyone, and rag-time style jazz smelling of expired copyright and rank record sleeves.

Was this done on purpose? An implementation metaphor for this collapsed future that we roam in exhilaration? A time-travelling training application arrived from an as yet unopened Vault? We’d like to think so. We would change very little in it. Perhaps we’d add some tunes to the maddening drone of the soundtrack. Say, for instance:

Blank Realm’s Soul Illusion sounds like NEU’s! Hero as produced in a hostile environment of kerosene powered, dust impacted tech, and sang in campsites booby trapped against slave-hunter incursions. It hums with the trippy vibration of the tribal water witch’s divining rod as she approaches a vast underwater reservoir rich in the calcium of old bones, and the unfathomable particles of life spent and died under the gaze of an evil sun.

Blank Realm- Soul Illusion

Soul Illusion is included in Blank Realm’s Deja What CDR on Albert’s Basement, soon to be reissued in vinyl via Bedroom Suck Records.

Milk Maid’s Such Fun is the sort of faded garage romp you’d expect to hear cracking out of the malfunctioning radio of Goodspring’s Prospector Saloon, bouncing against walls stencilled with ashen silhouettes frozen in a teenage riot cut short by the nuclear holocaust.

As it is, we have adopted it as the nihilistic theme track for our Legionnaire scalp-hunting expeditions. Because this is what the end of the world as we know it will do to partying.

Milk Maid-Such Fun

You can get Milk Maid’s 7 from Suffering Jukebox.

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with rave