Cyberpunk 2022: Alive by Fentanyl Embrace

https://dreamcatalogue.bandcamp.com/album/cyberpunk-2022-alive

Genre: Vapor

Rating: 5/5

released on bandcamp January 25, 2022

In terms of sonic landscape, it doesn’t get better than this. The layers of sound are lush, comfortable, engaging, and very visual. It fills your brain with images and not just because of the vocals. The sound seems to trigger something in your visual cortex. This is a weird comparison but the Wu-Tang Clan and RZA’s production style was the first time I felt this exact way about music. This is very different however, whereas Wu-Tang is often very sparse and stark this is intensely dense.

In some ways this music is a nod to the influential nature of Negativland, especially lyrically. Except, this is more ambiguous. This leaves the listener with more room to decide how they feel about it. 2022 never feels ironic to me, however. Nor do I find it humorous. It feels very sincere.

There’s a machine like female guide offering comments on social reactions to everything since the beginning of Trumpism. Some of it perhaps critical of the futility of it all or perhaps critical of the belief that trying something, should be considered an exercise in futility. Then on the sixth track, The Labyrinth of Amala, a title that sounds like an Ursula K. Le Guin story to me but is actually the title of a song by Shoji Meguro and is part of the soundtrack to a video game which is perhaps a much bigger player in this record than I realize. Anyway, on this sixth track they sample a news report of a tragic factory fire in Bangladesh. I remember when it happened. I traveled to Bangladesh when I was in my twenties and always feel sorrow when hear of their suffering. Global warming is already wreaking havoc there. It is also at this point the female machine guide goes away. A delicious sample of some Gregorian Chant comes in and tracks seven through nine seem to be taking us to a melancholy future.

A don’t see how any serious music fan could find this record anything less than brilliant.