2653: The Year In Review

The following excerpt was originally published in Growth And Prosperity in the Modern Age with Howliday Publishing inc. I have decided to reprint it here based on it's seemingly insightful observations which we all know were completely unfounded with the light of hindsight.

The year 2653 was an uncharacteristically innovative one compared with the basically boring output of 2652. Maybe we just had to find our own niche to set ourselves apart from the roaring '40s. We needed some breathing room to reinvent that iconic decade's impact on the greater Magellanic Clouds or at least absorb and digest all that had changed and happened. For me, the early '50s were most of all characterized by a mourning of the end of a very special era. An era that we can be proud to say that we had taken part in and will look back on in the coming years with love, and nostalgia.

But the time of mourning has passed. Making headway in this burgeoning scene of new-anti-genres and pro-anti-neo-genres were such ambitious newcomers like People w/Problems, The Dumbest Luck, and So So So. Not only were these three visionary in their output, but signify a certain shifting of the guards. Spawning a bumper crop of imitators, we can see, easily, that these two groups and a collective will have an indispensable influence on the landscape of music in the years to come. I for one, welcome our nanite leaders in this exciting new age. . .

. . .first and foremost of course, are Pw/P. Unabashedly influenced by Gamma Sigmotron The Last Human Band (not to be confused with Sigmoidal Gamblon), Pw/P more than anyone else this year, signified the birth of something new. It was not a derivative sound, it was an homage. At times it could be said that their approach was a general critique of all the 8-bit knockoffs that surfaced at GStLHB's peak, adding all the more irony to Pw/P's imitators. The approach of uploading themselves into planet bound containers and making music the same way as the humans of GStLHB, while the bodies slowly died as caustic atmospheric gases ate away at their fragile bodies, seems like a gimmick at first, but then you hear how it sounds. Theres something to be said for the loving adherence to the tropes of an old fashioned style which we had all thought could never have another relevant reinvention. I for one, only listened to 22nd century music for a long, long time after getting into Pw/P. Their second album was unleashed upon the public at the tail end of the year, still only several kiloseconds ago as I write this now. The eponymous album, a single 16 hour project cataloging and slowly reminning the dying cries of sentient supernovae, is oddly in sync with their other effort. Yes, this is a collective to look out for, lest they eat the diamond that your soul is stored on, and we may never look at the planets, or the stars, the same ever again.