Tag: David Brin

There is a distinct feeling of accidentally tuning into a secret television station before everything went digital when shedde0d’s “Painthing” begins. Hazy white noise with an unmistakable background presence. Then the distorted archaic keyboard melody comes in breaking and going off any standard, recognizable progression in key. More impressionistic like a robot out of an old Asimov or Philip K. Dick story woke up in the ruins of an abandoned amusement park on a remote planet left behind during the expansion of a galactic empire with a vague notion of its original programmed mission but enough self awareness to explore outside of those parameters and in the absence of other beings to provide input, set about to make its own carnival orchestra piece completely unaware of how it’s “supposed” to sound. It’s refreshingly reminiscent, on pure vibes alone, of the mysterious and psychedelic quality of science fiction cinema of the 70s like Zardoz or Logan’s Run where the future wasn’t so readily predictable and we could imagine the collapse of civilization into small, sequestered Utopias that can go sideways while the rest of the world recovers with the remains of our former, quasi-advanced civilizations. This song sounds like what it would feel like to take that as a launching off point of speculation into the kinds of music that might have been made if your point of reference was 1980s post-apocalyptic cinema but set in the sprawling “development” of an expansive galactic civilization where niche interests could survive and be left alone to progress on its own after the priorities once injected into them have moved on. Larry Niven and David Brin picked up where the ideas of the Foundation series left off and this song is like a musical equivalent of imagining a time and place that isn’t too far off and isn’t set in what seems like the likely aftermath of catastrophic climate change and the impending disaster of rising, global authoritarianism and austerity. This song is the sound of the hope of there being survival well into humanity’s future where someone or something picks up the fragments of culture and makes something hauntingly beautiful out of it. Listen to “Painthing” on Bandcamp and follow Portuguese experimental project shedde0d at the links below. The full album The New Kid dropped on December 24, 2023 and is filled with similarly fantastical music creations.