If You're Into It, I'm Out of It (1997)
1990s angst descends into the mouth of a leviathan of apathy - a lost world found out of the grey and into the darker. German producer Christoph de Babalon conjures a mix of dark-ambient and breakcore fitting for an apocalyptic video game, perhaps dealing with everyday life and a hunger for escapism. The opening track, "Opium", drops its anchor of a looming atmosphere, and makes its initial venture into drum n' bass with "Nostep" Welcome to the Graveyard.
The record proceeds to unwind across a collection of breakcore beats which lends itself to one hand of the record as a sword to fend off the inner demons, which unveils an overlord boss as the droning progresses. Slowed crashes and faint, shrieking bombs are heard near the end of the penultimate track, "High Life. (Theme)", with no consolation. The energy of breakcore is regurgitated in, "My Confession", closing this fascinating record. It leaves a reminder that things can happen in cycles and to escape it is a wheel being constantly rolled upwards.
6/21/2024・Eduardo Castaneda
Archive Lucida
The technological revolution, a by-product of late-stage capitalism, ultimately led art to a Marxist destination — the cinema. Unique in its technological reproducibility and inherent ability to escape the bounds of singularity, early cinema achieved an unprecedented populistic appeal amongst its urban proletariat audiences. Film is a democratizing medium, accessible to the masses through the reorientation of dominant institutional hierarchies and cultural exclusivities. Archive Lucida adopts this same objective as a universalizing platform for digital humanities research, preservation, and publication. Our collections are curated and made public for mass consumption, free from traditional barriers to entry. Our platform draws inspiration from the Early Surrealists, French photographer Eugène Atget, Filmmaker László Moholy-Nagy, and the writings of Walter Benjamin, Anton Kaes, and Gernot Böhme. As a freeform, digital archive, we aim to make underrepresented art, time-based media, and academic materials decentralized and publicly accessible.
