You know what? I’m not even going to try with BLACK RAIN. Genres and sub-genres are elusive anyway. Is it Industrial? Post-punk? Cyberpunk? All of the above? It doesn’t really concern me and it’s only helpful trying to describe it to someone else. That’s ostensibly what’s supposed to happen here but it’s probably easier to listen for yourself.
It’s all the brainchild, apparently, of a William Gibson/Philip K Dick devotee named Stuart Argabright, along with a cast of sci-fi conspirators from around the globe. Science fiction pretty well describes it.
It’s rare that I throw anything up here in bits and bytes like this but it’s only available broken up like this, and I suppose if I dug deeper I could find the earlier work from the 90s. This project has been around for a minute. Whatever you want to call it though, it works for me. I don’t why traditional rock and pop music has felt so empty for me as time goes. It’s certainly got something to do with the socio-political climate but naming specific triggers would be pointless. I keep thinking of news footage from around the country in recent months of panicked cops driving their trucks into crowds of protesters, and tear gas and beatings and brutality. Things have calmed down some but the feeling that things are still falling apart is still there. Call this musical exploration a nervous response if you like. It all just sounds and feels right for the times. There’s a gray concrete slab heaviness to the air. Not hot. Not cold. Just heavy. The air itself has weight and it doesn’t feel like it’s about to be lifted at any point in the immediate or even near surface.
Don’t get it twisted. It’s not my personal feelings. I’m just an observer, or a witness. A reporter, if you will. We’re headed into an election season in which the side of good is very likely to fail. It’s not going to come as a surprise like 2016 when Clownface Von Fuckstick shocked us all and we woke up and had a realty television star in charge of the most powerful country in the world. Anyone who seems surprised just hasn’t been paying attention. The major opposition is run largely by insipid and often delusional (or just plain dishonest) fossils who beyond being frail are pushing ideals that weren’t well grounded forty years ago when they were so ill-conceived. They’ve mythologized hard-won victories from the past and are telling us that all we have to do is hold hands and sing.
I would yawn right here but I’d be likely to throw up into my mouth.
These are strange times. I almost wrote that we are about to enter strange times but we’re already deep inside and it’s a complex labyrinth. Youtube, by the way, knows me all too well, because they’ve tossed this one at me as the next collection. I’ve posted this Sovietwave mix before but it seems appropriate this morning while I’m running this thread. The Soviet narrative which was always largely based on falsehoods, collapsed thirty years ago and exposed the inequality and corruption that ran the show all along, and there are still many who having seen the real world long to return to the dream that it was all for something. That’s pretty much where The United States is now. Our Matrix has glitched so many times that the code that holds up the veil is coming apart, error by error towards complete systems failure. What’s left but monuments to the illusion. It’s ironic that The White House contacted the Governor of South Dakota this past week to talk about having Donald J. Trump added to Mount Rushmore, which in many ways is the most perverse monument of all already. The only salvation that may prevent the addition is the lack of a ledge big enough to carve out the bigheaded bastard’s obscene combover swoop.
Let’s wrap this up though with Youtube’s algorithmic laugh, a full hour of melancholic Sovietwave:
What rough beast 