Octant – Shock-No-Par (1999)

Futuristic pop, played by a true "mensch-maschine" consortium (yes, that is a (post-Ralf & Florian) Kraftwerk slam), that included, among many other self-made gadgets, not a drum machine, nor electronic beats, but a real drum-kit played live by a robotic device (or Jaki Liebezeit's dream come cybernetically true); an idea that should have earned Octant an immediate cult following by itself, but which, as a most welcome bonus, was then put at the service of proper catchy tunes, whose sound profile reinvigorated the increasingly impaired perception, in post-industrial societies (more precisely, societies which have offshored their industrial production), of the magnitude of real world resources and physical infrastructures our daily lives (including its artistic manifestations) depend on. 

It is easy to realize that the advancement of any civilizational process entails the expansion of socially invisible dimensions of social organization; that greater expands of everyday life are taken for granted, as if everything we need to go about our way materialized everyday out of thin air. Yet, that is something the non-survivalists of us are only briefly reminded of when systemic shit hits the fan, after which we immediately go back to sublimating that stress-inducing awareness via whatever alienating means at our disposal, including doomscrolling, binge-watching apocalyptic fiction, or writing amateur music reviews; and that obliviousness can be felt in musical creation too, as an expression not only of individual creativity, but of social dynamics and technological conditions as well. 

Not to disparage specific genres or modes of musical production wholesale, what differentiates this record for me is the way it actually incorporates the materiality of mechanisms and circuit boards, of the hardware involved in making it, instead of just relying on the abstraction of code, zeros and ones. That gives it a real analogical feel and weight that a lot of electronic or (more to the point here) "indietronic" (ugh) music increasingly came to bypass with its digital software and sampling shortcuts, lacking any kind of physical grounding to make it feel real and alive instead of a form of simulated escapism into some sort of musical metaverse (particularly when it tries to mimic that physicality, as in the turn of the century overuse of samples of scratchy vinyls played in old turntables to automatically evoke times gone by; nothing as ever sounded more lifeless and artificial to me). 

So, to gratuitously trash another band in this context, I'll be repeat-listening to this long before I succumb to the latest retro-space-age dilettantism of the likes of Stereolab. 

More than that, if this were any indication of how life under our future robotic overlords would sound like, I might even be willing to let Skynet (or whatever we're calling it these days) take over already, no questions asked; though it is more likely that this record was rather just an endearing glitch in the matrix.

Whatever the case, I do at least hope there is one last thing humans and machines can firmly agree on before the fall: no more Terminator movies, please; they have been useless.