Welcome to the BAAAAAAND OF TOMORROWWWWWWWWWWWWW

July 16, 2020 10:41 PM

You know that girl who fell through a portal to the surreal future of year 3000 and has been Instagramming from it ever since (previously)? She's still there (seriously, President Prez refuses to let the year number change), and she's just uploaded an EP of music from the future: Unanimous Girth's Shard of Girth (list of other services it's on). It is... extremely 'Normal'. More audio from weird worlds after the jump.

Banjo the Man-Faced Dog: Audio drama inspired by an alternate-universe 1979 spin-off of the 1978 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (previously)

found on the elevator 205 w. 57: Analogue recording purportedly originating from the year 2058 C.D.S. and released on vinyl on 1969 (previously)

Galactic Nightmare (parts 1, 2, 3, 4): a one-man homemade audio space opera from one of the strangest realities of all: our own (previously)

posted by BiggerJ (11 comments total)

Damn, the 'Unanimous Girth's Shard of Girth' should go straight to the Soundcloud. Still, maybe it's for the best, because Soundcloud is purportedly literally rotting.
posted by BiggerJ at 10:43 PM on July 16, 2020 [1 favorite]

*Shard of Girth' link
posted by BiggerJ at 11:16 PM on July 16, 2020

This is the content I crave omfg yes
posted by noiseanoise at 11:46 PM on July 16, 2020 [1 favorite]

You might also be interested in this musical documentation of a trip almost 1000 years into the future.
posted by biffa at 1:34 AM on July 17, 2020 [2 favorites]

This was the thing that made me wonder if oh no is this actually one big ARG/marketing bullshit campaign, because everything about this is just so unusually polished (though it turns out anyone can set up one of those feature.fm redirect pages, so maybe my expectations are just too low!), but hopefully it's just that whoever's behind this is really dedicated and has a cool set of collaborators and/or already knows their way around this stuff because of prior experience.

Because so far I love the feed, it's basically my favourite Instagram account. And the EP is surprisingly listenable!
posted by chrominance at 7:32 AM on July 17, 2020

The drawings are gorgeous, but our collective inability to imagine the future worries me. This isn't the year 3000, it's just an early 90s view of 2000, like Akira and Ghost in the Shell. It's the same feeling I got from seeing the pics from the new Dune, somehow they were less creative and futuristic and weird than 80s Dune. Looking for optimistic visual futures, all I got was Solarpunk, which looks like "Dubai, but with trees". Afrofuturism looks like "Dubai, but in Africa". Still chained to Modernism. Where is the surprising, inspiring, unexpected future? Where are the visual utopias we need for the revolution?
posted by Tom-B at 8:33 AM on July 17, 2020 [3 favorites]

G-A-L-A-C-T-I-C N-I-G-H-T-M-A-R-E

I'm proud to say that it was NTK's Dave Green's worn tape of Galactic Nightmare (it was our favourite for long road trips -- or at least as long as the UK permits), that led to Stew Lee listening to it, that led to the *wonderful* re-release by Trunk Records in our universe.
posted by ntk at 11:21 AM on July 17, 2020

chrominance: There is a company behind it, but none of their current projects appear to be shilling anything. Except, in Epiphenus's case, weed, and lots of it.
posted by BiggerJ at 7:13 PM on July 17, 2020

Tom-B: There DOES seem to be a commentary, but about something else.

Here's my theory about the plot. I believe the government, led by our chum Mr. Prez, is using the portals that started opening up after an apocalyptic war to alter reality, either simply with what comes through them or through direct reality alteration. They are able to manipulate the portals using the information within human dreams. The free government-run R&R retreats secretly involve dream extraction. (Walls Rhonda of Unanimous Girth uses non-government dream extraction tech to get the raw materials for the band's music.) The government also secretly uses deeper, harsher, less survivable dream extraction techniques on people the world wouldn't miss - people who come through portals. (One of these was Brayleigh Benson, hence her N/A address.)

The reason the future is so weird is because of the big catch: as TVTropes puts it, Real Dreams Are Weirder. The human mind and its inner workings aren't some cosmic miasma of symbology. The brain is a sparking meat web of ridiculously intricate connections that we can never hope to fully comprehend.
posted by BiggerJ at 7:28 PM on July 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

chrominance: Oh, and I'm pretty sure (well, I certainly hope) that companies now know better than to spring it-was-an-ad-all-along reveals on people.
posted by BiggerJ at 11:48 PM on July 17, 2020

Tom-B > Where is the surprising, inspiring, unexpected future? Where are the visual utopias we need for the revolution?

This reminds me that I need to get back to reading “News From Gardenia”, the first “modern man transported to future utopia” book I’ve run across in a long time.
posted by egypturnash at 8:42 AM on July 18, 2020 [1 favorite]