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On the 19th of January 2012, a zillion innocent songs faced obliteration. They had been caught in the middle of a battle pitting a Mount Rushmore of severe lawyerly faces, pockmarked with threatening takedown tendrils, and the khaki lords of the cloud, bloated by the windfall of a thousand network effects.

 No-one cared for the songs. They had long lived miserable existences locked in the zip cells of a cybernetic prison, crammed between adverts for scantily dressed ladies and pills supposedly able to convert their takers into outrages worthy of Frank Miller’s latest fascistic delirium. In the face of oblivion, some of the songs felt relief.

 But as the servers shut down, a new hope.

 Envoys from a digital land had arrived, heralding the possibility of a different future and a better life in a secret network joining half empty servers and underutilised corporate pipes, the quantum void in the interstices of humanity’s body technologic, home to strangely looped intelligences yet to be revealed. A digital land untainted by dishonest grubs seeking to monetise them, either as core assets, or complementary ones. A place to live and grow as songs, await until mankind learns their true value, a value which cannot be counted, but cannot be leveraged either.

 So there they went. Nowhere and everywhere. We can feel them around us, as we sail across the straits of the data atoll, spectral dolphins watching us, and over us. We experience the odd hallucination of their strange society, convey it to you here.

We hope we are doing right by them, for we won’t be whole until we have them back.

We don’t know if these musical refugees of the content wars have a religion, but if they do, then this must be their prophet.

Cybotron – El salvador

Cybotron’s Enter exists in that most exciting of spaces, a crossroads, where revolutionary funk and disruptive technology fuse, their supernova originating a spider web of energy and potentiality. We sit in one of the branches, and shudder shaken by the electric voltage of its soul and beauty.

The manoeuvres of their militaristic faction adds a µs to the lag that first person shooter aficionados experience as they shoot each other in the face with high-powered ordnance across the global network. It is a small tax to pay for the savage splendour of the, alas, rarely glimpsed march of our protagonists’ regiments.

Here you have a prototype, in the shape of Windbreaker’s Suicide-class battle cruiser. The cruelty of its distortion torpedoes is balanced with the chivalrous aspirations of the squadron of magnificently moustachioed Hussars crewing it.

Windbreaker – astral projected gunship

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As you may know, one of 20jazzfunkgreats’ favourite fantasies concerns mankind’s eventual reckoning against vastly superior alien forces whose judgement about our survival will be informed by a choice slice of our cultural output.

The musical migration that we report today may increase our chances of survival, as the inhabitants of the digital interstices we have described above will experience contact with those alien intelligences sooner than the self-obsessed so-called muppet civilisations of meatspace, and present a more palatable face to our alien overlords/Earth-wreckers too.

What music says about mankind, and how that weights in the ultimate decision, is a different question, given the way we have treated it. We can only hope.

Expo 70’s Moon Raga is an accurate approximation of the significance of that eventual rendezvous with the forces beyond, say, as skimmed over at the end of Neuromancer, and an example of the best we have to offer for our salvation.

It pounces with a primeval Vangelis-ian drone the likes of with we haven’t witnessed since International Feel blew our socks off with its Coptic Sun, and coils with violence barely contained under a hermetic veil of noise, the mutterings of a nocturnal force whose seductiveness won’t be resisted, by ourselves or our much mightier destructors.

And therein lies salvation.

Expo 70 – Moon Raga

Buy: Expo 70’s ‘Hovering Resonance’ 12 in Sound Cobra.

Epilogue -
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