Without wanting to spoil one of the best sci-fi movies of the 1970s, I’m sure you’ve had enough time to watch it, there’s a crushing scene in the Douglas Trumbull movie. quiet operation which imagines a biome floating through deep space, its vegetation sustained in perpetuity by a loyal robot. This off-world balance can run and run, is the idea, at least until the next civilization finds it. Detroit authority Erika’s closed system techno operates on the same principle.
void anevite it’s the second full-length album from Erika Sherman, though she’s been active in her local scene for nearly three decades. Now known as a DJ and live act, Sherman was recruited into electronic duo Ectomorph in the late ’90s to replace Drexciya’s Gerald Donald. She is among the core staff of Interdimensional Transmissions, the Detroit record label founded in 1994 by academic-turned-DJ Brendan M. Gillen (aka BMG) on persistent instructions from “old voices” who repeatedly urged him to quit. his girlfriend and start doing techno.
There’s a clear instability in IT’s worldview, which prescribes 14-hour raves and quality sound for audiophiles looking for an escape from the mainframe. Some artists on the label have taken their music in especially idiosyncratic directions: Alpha 606’s energetic take on Cuban electronic roots; the creaky cassette house of IBM (an alias for Hieroglyphic Being); IF’s silly, formative “Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass.” Erika’s music is more like the seal’s neutral atomic nucleus, a technoid balance experiment built out of space station equipment. (He void anevite the liner notes include a thank you to “my closest friends and family”: 27-bit kit from Roland, genoQs, Moog, et al.) With all that technology at your disposal, you might expect the results to feel dense. and overworked but void anevite it is quite sparsely populated. There’s a concept, of course: the “irregular life cycles” of an alien planet, half rocky desert, half deep forest, orbited by three suns, with each clue describing what she calls the “survival acts of biomes.” . A robot drone may be lurking with a battered watering can, but there is certainly no humanoid life.
If Sherman’s IT agency mates dream of ancient aliens and space invaders, Erika’s imagination is more science than fiction. Sometimes her systems are barely breathing, all rhythm reduced to the ticking of vital signs, like a bank of hospital monitors hooked up to a meditating monk. After the obligatory opening ambient track, “Opal Haze” goes into a Detroit-style high-tech jazz wave: tight blank kicks, a splash of low notes, sparkling hats. “Desert Red” creeps into a bottled-up bassline as a billion synapses flicker on and off. In “Anion”, the gaseous remains of the IDM of the 90s evaporate on contact.
