The Sprawl

“No one goes home. Nobody else comes through”

This mix started off as a request by my friend Jorge for a sequel to the Alien/Sci-fi mix that I did a year or so ago. The conversation might have been triggered by listening to Klaus Schulze’s album Cyborg at home one evening as the first idea was to have a cyborg flavoured mix and the first place-holder name of the mix was actually “Cyborg”. Initially I began to make a list of some movie source material for samples and sound effects that would drive the ambience and “narrative” including Terminator and some of the more dubious cyborg/robot-themed Sci Fi films of that type including Cyborg and Universal Soldier, none of which I had or have ever seen. There was therefore a rough early idea that the sounds would suggest flesh and machines.

However, by coincidence, at the same time I had started to listen to a lot of Sonic Youth. This included both the old albums I used to love when I was at university and the newer post-Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star albums which I had never heard as the band had by then drifted off the radar. Sonic Youth had also been discussed a lot in summer when another friend Patrick was over visiting with his family (when I mentioned the mix to Patrick during the creation he referred me to Alva Noto which was a glorious find). One of the things he mentioned to me was an anecdote about the Sister album and that it was inspired by Philip K Dick’s twin sister who died shortly after birth. Daydream Nation also had a track on it called The Sprawl inspired by William Gibson whereas one of the more recent albums, Sonic Nurse, also features another track Pattern Recognition also inspired by Gibson and his 2003 novel of the same name. As I started revising all the Terminator films for samples and atmosphere, including the appalling Terminator’s 3 and 4 which I had never seen, and listening to Sonic Youth, it seemed that they should somehow be combined. It also seemed logical that to make the mix as different as possible from all the others I have done that it should feature as many guitars as possible. There is therefore a question in the mix, that old fashioned question that was asked a lot at the time that electronic music and rave emerge “what is authentic music?” Authenticity is also a very important theme to Dick and to Blade Runner. In the mix the guitars and the electronic music should confront each other, sometimes dividing, sometimes uniting, challenging each other to be victorious and more real than the other (flesh and machine). In a certain way the idea is then to explore cyberpunk as both a whole, but also to divide it into cyber and punk halves. In the latter case, post-punk rather than pure punk is a more accurate interpretation.

Cyborg then pretty quickly became The Sprawl in terms of idea and mood, but also in terms of what the music itself was suggesting through its own genealogy. In a search for new tracks I kept coming across artists and tracks that made direct reference to the Sprawl, such as Sonic Youth, Blush Response and the electronic collaborative group The Sprawl (Logos, Mumdance and Shapednoise), who sadly do not feature despite some effort to find some place for them at various occasions. Arcade Fire are way too pop to even thing about.

 



Bringing it all together, the idea was to create a vibe that was reminiscent of a place like the Sprawl, neon and chrome, dystopian, lonely people filled with television anxiety, an endless city filled with wonder and despair, body hacking, technology fetish, violence, grime, virtual reality and drugs. A “high-tech shanty town”. However, whereas Gibson’s Sprawl in the books refers to the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA) on the East coast of the USA the mix is definitely intended to be a West Coast thing, especially LA which is the scene of the Terminator movies as well as Blade Runner which is of course heavily indebted to Dick and emerged at the time that Neuromancer was published. In terms of Blade Runner, the new film came out while the mix was already underway (the mix was started around August in terms of ideas and track hunting and finished in January 2018), but I wanted to steer clear of Blade Runner as much as possible, or at least to suggest it in many of the tracks and the mood, but not depend on it. I caved at the end, but it seemed almost appropriate in a way, a return to that theme of eternity where “my invented world” in the mix suggests the “real world” of Blade Runner, but it is only when the latter emerges at the climax that the real vs the authentic becomes a doubt and a question.

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” 

The idea was also to capture an 80s vibe when the cyberpunk genre started to emerge. Many of the tracks were identified doing searches for random music that might be from that time that or that might contain guitars, be dark ambient, dark wave etc. This is how I found Factrix which was a gold mine and I knew that no matter what Phantom Pain had to be in there. Chrome also comes up when looking for these kinds of search terms although I was already a convinced fan. Sadly I couldn’t match in their guitar sound as much as desired since they were perhaps too song based at times. But being a West Coast band, there was a lot of desire to get them in there and their warped and dystopian sci fi tendencies clearly fit the overall mood. Chris and Cosey also came about looking for these kinds of tracks as well as Gamardah Fungus from Ukraine, Phase Fatale and Boris with Merzbow (albeit all of these are more contemporary).

The mix should therefore try to assemble different levels of entrance (jacking in) and exit from consciousness and reality, an intentional audio virtual reality which should hopefully conjure up images of passing Tron-like through cyber security networks to reach different environments, all within the Sprawl, psychedelic experiences in the modern city and the pressuere and tension of information driving capitalism and seeding doubt and questions of identity. Or it could be even a virtual reality passage to the Sprawl from the present time. Some of the voices (especially Kim Deal’s and Factrix) are meant to resemble characters in a vague movie plot coming back occasionally and influencing the narrative.

The original idea of the end was to finish with the end of Sonic Youth’s Trilogy: Eliminator JR, but this was jettisoned in favour of the end of Trilogy: Hyperstation which has a much more tolerant pace for mixing in. In the climax I also wanted to use Ital’s White II from the 2014 album Endgame (Planet Mu), but the sounds were strangely too cyber (much like the group The Sprawl) and I couldn’t get the mix right with my primitive setup (everything was done with Adobe Audition CS5). Evan Caminiti’s album Toxic City Music was tried out in several places, but never quite worked whereas I would have loved to fit in Soft Cell's Slave to This track from Last Night in Sodom that was from the same mid-80s era that the mix tries to evoke and seems to resemble the kind of madness and mind meld of reality and virtual reality running together. I also looked at trying to build on the guitar aspect with a more metal influence with labels such as Cold Meat Industry from Sweden providing some interesting options that were not easy to weave in or too dominant in a demonic way and thus fell by the wayside. There are some snippets of Sephiroth and Leviathan, although I would have liked a bit more perhaps of these and the metal sounds (these were also specially considered for Jorge and Carles). Like the Ital track, it was not possible to get in some New Zealand noise like Gate, Birchville Cat Motel or the Dead C, as well as the non-NZ Double Leopards, as again, with these tracks it was hard to get the texture right since they are generally really low fi and stand out too much when they come in (raising the question of musical authenticity again, perhaps; compare their fidelity with Ital for example). Saåad’s album Verdaillon was another that I couldn’t find a place for. In terms of numbers, it is worth pointing out that there were 275 tracks in the final shortlist (equivalent to 1.1 days of continuous music listening!) of which 58 made the final cut. However, as many of the tracks were also cut up and rearranged and with additional samples there is probably close to 100 individual sound files collaged together in the final mix.

As well as plenty of tunes that didn’t make the final cut there are plenty of cyberpunk films that I never referred to and/or haven’t seen yet including the Matrix trilogy which I loathe, Johnny Mnemonic (too much Keanu Reeves), Ex Machina, New Rose Hotel, Strange Days (another LA film with James Cameron links), Ghost in the Shell (not the new version) or any other animé film.

Dedicated to: Jorge Boscan, Carles Roca, Patrick van Kann. In memory of the late Steve Barwick and his game of Shadowrun.

Track	Artist	Title	Label	Year
1	Sonic Youth	(I got a) Catholic block	SST	1987
2	Sonic Youth	Mote	DGC	1990
3	Sonic Youth with Christian Wolf	Edges (1969)	Sonic Youth Records (SYR)	1999
4	Sonic Youth	Ghost bitch	Blast First	1985
5	Chrome	TV as eyes	Siren Records	1976
6	Factrix	Splice of life	Adolescent Records	1980
7	CTI (Chris & Cosey, Joe Potts & John Duncan)	Trapezoid	Play It Again Sam Records	1988
8	Silent Servant	Untitled	Ecstatic	2017
9	Autechre	Second bad vibel	Warp	1995
10	SNTS	Origin of light	Samurai Horo	2017
11	Blush Response	Rebirthed in the Sprawl I	Total Black	2016
12	Lustmord	Babel	Blackest Ever Black	2013
13	Lustmord	Grigori	Blackest Ever Black	2013
14	Gamardah Fungus	Opium	Hidden Vibes	2013
15	Sonic Youth	Contre le sexisme	DGC	1998
16	Samuel Kerridge	Straight to hell	Downwards	2013
17	My Disco	1991 (Lustmord 20/20 remix)	Downwards	2016
18	Regis	Blinding horses (Turin version)	Blackest Ever Black	2013
19	Leviathan	A silhouette in splinters	Profound Lore Records	2005
20	Svreca	Jade (Skirt remix)	Semantica	2012
21	Sonic Youth	I love her all the time	Blast First	1985
22	Sonic Youth	Expressway to your soul	SST	1986
23	Ancestral Voices	Divination	Samurai Horo	2017
24	Sonic Youth	The Sprawl	Blast First	1988
25	Sonic Youth	Providence	Blast First	1988
26	Roly Porter	Gravity	Subtext	2013
27	Sephiroth	The call of the serpent	Cold meat Industry	2005
28	Factrix	Phantom pain	Adolescent Records	1981
29	Silent Servant	End / Optimism	Infrastructure New York	2016
30	Abdulla Rashim	Under this wasted sky	Northern Electronics	2014
31	Dadub	Life	Stroboscopic Artefacts	2013
32	Sonic Youth	Brave men run (in my family)	Blast First	1985
33	Oscar Mulero	Black propaganda	Warm Up Recordings	2012
34	Scarpa	Pi-hahiroth	Frozen Border	2015
35	SNTS	A1	Horizontal Ground	2014
36	Danil Araya	Acid ambient 1	Kontra Musik	2016
37	Lustmord	Grigori	Blackest Ever Black	2013
38	Phase Fatale	Beast	Hospital productions	2017
39	Roly Porter	High places	Tri Angle	2016
40	Autechre	Second bad vibel	Warp	1995
41	Fjäder	Hjärtans Fröjd	Shaded Explorations	2016
42	Hans Zimmer & Benjamin Wallfisch	2049	Epic	2017
43	Vangelis	Tales of the future	EastWest	1993
44	Alva Noto	Xerrox monophaser 2	Raster-Noton	2007
45	Blush Response	Rebirthed in the Sprawl I	Total Black	2016
46	Hvide Sejl, Varg, F. Valentin	A Vase on a Table & a Painting in a Room	Posh Isolation	2016
47	Alva Noto	Xerrox Teion	Raster-Noton	2007
48	Boris and Merzbow	Akuma no uta	Relapse Records	2016
49	Sonic Youth with James Tenney	Having Never Written a Note for Percussion	Sonic Youth Records (SYR)	1999
50	Sonic Youth	The Trilogy: The Wonder	Blast First	1988
51	Burial Hex	Book of Delusions (St. Hilarys Day Remix)	Brave Mysteries	2011
52	My Disco	Our decade	Temporary Residence Limited	2015
53	Carter Tutti Void	V1	Mute	2012
54	Burial Hex	Book of Delusions (St. Hilarys Day Remix)	Brave Mysteries	2011
55	Fjäder	Venus	Shaded Explorations	2016
56	Ancestral Voices	Divination	Samurai Horo	2017
57	Varg	Ursviken	Northern Electronics	2015
58	Sonic Youth	The Trilogy: Hyperstation	Blast First	1988

Features extra samples from: Bade Runner (1982), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Terminator (1984), Terminator: Salvation (2009), Escape From New York (1981)