CLOUDWARMER :: Nostalgia For a Future That Never Happened (blocSonic)

Swimming together in the tangential downpour of torrential media percussion and repercussion, all of this material can be considered as an excavation of a lost futurist consciousness.

Hauntological graffiti

CLOUDWARMER’s latest offering takes listeners on a strange journey to a dark place, where the links with the past are connected to a future that has disappeared under the weight of its own visionary failure. Hauntology continues to haunt the electronic music listener and producer. Listening, I am also haunted by ontology, the branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being. If you can call that hauntology then this is hauntological graffiti.

Across an epic twenty tracks of average-to-longer pop song length, this Nostalgia for a Future that Never Happened, is like partaking in a media séance where the “other minds” of people whose voices were captured on past recordings have been summoned up from an eldritch retronomicon and collaged alongside boom-bap beats, record scratches, and pervasive snippets of audio detritus. The result is a consciousness stream of sculpted flotsam and jetsam. Swimming together in the tangential downpour of torrential media percussion and repercussion, all of this material can be considered as an excavation of a lost futurist consciousness.

Eating algae popsicles ::

These songs are passports for going back in time to see how the future the boomers hoped for appeared to them, before they got caught up in Reaganomics, before the bright shiny thing was disrupted by dark black swans and other unforeseen calamitous events that forever ruined the possibility of flying cars, space taxis, vacationing on the moon, and living in undersea cities while eating algae popsicles full of pea protein. There is a sadness in that, because the future we have isn’t the one so many people thought we ordered.

I remember reading books about the future as a kid, with wide-eyed wonder. Some of the future past has come to pass, most of it hasn’t. The best we’ve been able to do with robots in our home for instance, is to use them as vacuum cleaners and as kitty litter boxes. So far, it seems this is as good as fully automated luxury capitalism/communism is going to get.

Slurred like the grain of old videos at low-res bit rates ::

These songs are rhythmically slurred like the grain of old videos at low-res bit rates, just like the memories of the high tech future preserved in the yellowing pages of those rotting books I once read, if anybody bothered to save them. (Move slow and save things, that’s my decelerationist motto.)

Throughout this continuum of refracted sci-fi aesthetics, CLOUDWARMER’s extra-dimensional sense of aesthetics roams down hypnotronic pathways. The mind can wander across through these labyrinthine tracks as a guided meditation scoured from old cassette tapes found at the thrift store and downloaded off the memory trance of YouTube video preservation archaeology or Archive.org’s Wayback Machine.

This melding of downbeat triptophonics continues to reverberate Mark Fisher’s “persistent echo of lost futures.” These beats are for writing hauntological graffiti from spray cans across the stereo speakers only for them to fade away, and resurface again later as if from a half-remembered dream. But its traces are there, like lipstick from an errant kiss, a missed connection, something that might have been.

Plenty of surrealist synth patchwork ::

Did I mention how great the titles of the tracks are? They form their own elusive déjà vu narrative, here for a moment, and then slipping out of the fingers, drifting into the past. It seems like today might be the only day we have worth living for. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of surrealist synth patchwork going on to keep a latch on things.

So much of it is analog-sounding, but might be digital. Who knows, who cares. It sounds wonderful. These old-school waveshapers are part of what gives this album its nostalgic warmth. Groovy leads and heavy bass drops make sure this is no “lo-fi beats to study to” easy listening distraction from the surface world, but a recursive, echoplexed voyage down the haunted reverb chambers of the space race that was and of techno-utopian dreams. The utopia might not be here, but the electronic descendants of “techno music” certainly and are worth tuning into wherever your now happens to be.

Nostalgia For a Future That Never Happened is available on blocSonic. [Bandcamp]