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.
