Another Body Musick release, just two days old. I’ve beat around the last couple days with different sounds and vibes but keep coming back to the dark, minimal techno, industrial thing. You just have to go with what works. I’m going to copy and paste Filmmaker’s words again for this. There’s just no other way that makes sense.

BODY is pleased to present Panama Papers debut LP “John Doe’s Manifesto”. This colombian lo-fi electronics duo is formed by Pildoras Tapes label owners: Invalid User and GAËL. Fed by their social context and a controversial political concept, this album is a frenetic ride through wicked synth sequences and funky electropunk percussions layered on industrial atmospheres. On essence Panama Papers work sums to the revival of subversive electronics on this era with a solid output for avant-garde & rhythmic noise cassette culture.
John Doe’s Manifesto is a leftfield work passing through acid structures on tracks like “Landsbanski” and “Offshore”, synthwave glimpses on “Falsedad Ideologica” and “Delator” and industrial breaks like “Cayman Islands” that concludes on the Dopplereffekt-ish closing track “Navenby Inve$tment$”.

My connection with this harder, darker, minimal techno vibe was already happening but probably solidified with Crypto Order, who is apparently about to drop another… EP? LP? Not sure yet. It was Crypto Order that really blew the doors wide open for me and brought me into a new… framework. It’s within this framework that I found music that seems to relate directly to everything that’s going on around the world. The inability to cope with a pandemic… government violence… economic collapses. Collapses of the narratives that people held themselves together with. It had to be reflected somewhere in the art realm and it seems to be here. PANAMA PAPERS happens to me from Colombia, a country that has exploded in violence recently with the government squashing civil unrest and politicial opponents. I don’t really know what their own political stance is or where they fall on the whole spectrum, but the music expresses… unrest. The band name, and album title though, more than suggest an awareness of a depth of corruption that goes deeper and more widespread than most people are openly aware of. The release the original Panama Papers by the anonymous JOHN DOE, might ostensibly have been a bigger deal than it came to be. It exposed a level of theft and corruption so huge… but maybe it’s for the best that the ugliest truths get squashed and swept away. I don’t even know anymore. We’re not ready for anything all that cataclysmic. Not yet. Eventually it will come but why rush it?

I’m of course, throwing in a little dark humor there. It’s just that as much as I know it’s inevitable, the thought of how bad it will actually be when the shit really hits the fan terrifies me… But this is supposed to be about the music, right?

It’s damn hard to think about light, airy pop music when we’re sitting on a timebomb. Not that I can’t let it go from time to time, but…