(You know which Boris)

Arthur C. Clarke once said that ‘Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology is Undistinguishable from Magic’. Let us work this aphorism backwards, and apply it to Zombi’s corpus, as manifested and further advanced in their latest release, ‘Escape Velocity’.

For what does something that sounds like black magic tell us about the technology causing the effects that this magic is? That it is a sufficiently advanced technology, for sure, whose sophistication is directly correlated to the power of the magic to which we are subjected.

Is it a human technology? Is it an alien technology? Is it a crude technology reconfigured in some deft exercise of will?

We asked our crypto-engineer/interdisciplinary wiz kid in residence, Wilhelmina Vincenti to look into this matter in detail. She has spent the last few days in her laboratory, parsing Zombi sound-sequences with high-end scientific equipment smuggled from the former Soviet bloc; we now report some of the hypotheses coming out from this effort:

• Software: I have reverse engineered the sound waves from the Escape Velocity album to produce a sequence of instructions that can be transformed into machine code. When run, the program evolves into a neural network that after a handful of iterations shows clear signs of consciousness. It speaks solemnly in a dead language, both in the lab and in my dreams.

• Hardware: The 3D engine crashed when I attempted to visualise the geometrical structures that underpin this music. I edited some of the files to incorporate non-Euclidean assumptions into the analysis, and now it works. I have sent the output to some colleagues, including people at NASA. They say it looks like the blueprint for a self-replicating space probe powered by an energy source that generates wormholes for instant transportation across vast expanses of space, perhaps time too.

• Wetware: I have decrypted the output of the frequency heat-map by allocating pitch buckets to DNA bases, producing a snippet of genetic code that when injected into a bacteria dish rapidly takes control over the population, improving the efficiency of its nutritional processes, and generating new organic structures. The slit-eyed, leather winged aberration that has evolved through this process is getting too big for its cage.

We suspect that these are different aspects of the same phenomenon. Mina is at her chemistry lab right now, synthesising an organic compound with some of the information codified in the analogue chains of ‘Escape Velocity’. We are planning to take a small dose of this organic compound later, while staring at the clear night sky. We will let you know how it goes.

Zombi – DE3

Escape Velocity is a new instantiation of our manifesto: numinous motorik disco for emergent shamanic cults, party music for the post-singularity hivemind, the blueprint of an interstellar motorway for sexy silver machines piloted by a suicidal priesthood accelerating towards the ultimate event horizon. Go get.

Having gone so high, we needed to come down, and what better way to come down than into a damp cellar where a sweaty crowd bobs in synch with the exalted pulses of a lost italo classic? None, I tell you.

Only this isn’t a lost italo classic, but a new production by the Alba Project (Alba featuring the mighty Fred Ventura) forthcoming in Aube records, with sweet artwork by Syd Brak. It has all the signature elements of that synth-pop variant of 1980s eurodance that your 20jazzfunkgreats scribe is in particular thrall of, put together with technical accomplishment and emotional integrity – a melodic freestyle exploration of that pastel space somewhere in between heaven and hell where the freaks dance, rolling over an evil bass and a sexbot beat.

The Alba Project – Without You (Dub)

Check the original version here.

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with Aube Records Relapse Records