Akira's Armonica: A futurist odyssey through London's Docklands.

Perhaps an experience more particular to London dwellers, taking a journey on the cursory DLR train come nightfall. An autonomous, unmanned beast that adroitly glides through the crash points of the all-powerful, all seeing financial district of the capital. No human operator to call its own, the DLR automaton transports its fleshy cargo across the hypnotic neon cityscape that imparts a luminous presence on the soul of spectators held within. The former docklands now reconstituted as a swell of cubic structures that ordinates a new architectural grid over a formerly archaic chaos is unlike any other domain of the city. This strange new non-place, a ghost town yet teeming with bodies and marked with the name of Canary Wharf, should not be mistaken for a reification of tomorrow’s mass utopia as promised by the modernist project. This icy clash of unrelenting construction is a future for only the select few.

As I submit myself to the spectacle of the city, blinded by the light unfolding from the multiple portholes, amplified by the intensity and volume of sources, I choose to defer the sonic rumblings of the DLR beast for the soundtrack of my integrated personal music device (an mp3 player by any other name). Darkstar’s News from Nowhere seems to be the perfect accompaniment for this Futurist odyssey. Released within the past month or so, the London based trio have touched upon an essence of the time we occupy, a time that is also the same as one that has yet come to pass. The circular rhythms and harmonies of The Beach Boys are filtered through an as undiscovered computer machine, fracturing the voice into the one that constantly leaves and returns to the source, as if breaking away from confines of binary code and into the space of the tangibly real, only to once again return. The graceful drift of standout track Armonica being a key manifestation. Electronic textures meet with more organic piano driven ones, whilst the voice is artificially shifted in and out of stages of coherency as if by some unknown digital other. A clash of idiosyncratic materials is not produced here but rather a unification of them, as if to echo the continual evolution of symbiosis between man and machine.

Darkstar manufacture a futurism that speaks of a science fiction tomorrow that is already occurring within the present. A great deal of News from Nowhere recalls the visions and sounds of the monumental Akira anime, to me at least. If some parts are not actually sampled from the soundtrack, then they are likely based in part upon them at the very least, borrowing the electronically mastered xylophone effect and quirky vocal abstractions scattered throughout. Canary Wharf is similarly not so far removed from the hyper urbanism of Akira’s Neo-Tokyo cityscape. Buildings seemingly stretch into the sun, overpowering the sky with light pollution and sheer scale. As a visual, Neo-Tokyo reduces the human body to a miniscule presence, overpowering every inhabitant with awe at its trance inducing neon tableau. Though designed for the express purpose of habitation, these spaces look so wildly uninhabitable…how could a body actually live in spaces so determinably inhuman? The DLR journey produces a sensation not so far removed (In an uncanny twist, Both Neo-Tokyo and Canary Wharf share an Olympic stadium as a visible monument and symbol) perhaps only missing some cyberpunk biker gangs and a few odd looking telepath kids.

News from Nowhere and Akira both produce a document of futurism that describes an infinitude of lives being lived out in technological isolation. Futurist in the way they elaborate on the sensual properties of the present by aesthetically embodying possible outcomes of the contemporary timeline.  In this version of the present, a hundred apparatuses close at hand, devices to master and control the imminent  atmosphere of your pod space, but no tools however to remove this sense of alienation and estrangement from the million other bodies executing their lives in a fashion not too dissimilar. If one needed to find proof within that statement, the linear journey the DLR coerces the body through is an ample explication of the emerging dystopia. Darkstar and Akira merely provide visual and aural companions to the sights this burgeoning future has to offer. A spectacle to behold, a thousand rooms gaze at you from a thousand buildings, yet you’ll be hard pressed to really (and I mean really) find a place you’d want to actually ideally exist in throughout the entire thing.