"Time Machine" (JJCnV song) – Queen City Sounds and Art

Phoenix-based art punk band JJCnV recently released its single and video “Time Machine” giving a visual side of a song that seems to be about traveling in time to meet up with kindred space aliens to take off from this often dystopian hellscape of a present world. The contrast of crunchy riffs and melodic vocals is paired well with a video that’s black and white like a cross between Repo Man and an old episode of The Twilight Zone with black and white giving way to the color of the star crowded sky in full color hanging over the black and white earth and the three members of the band walking down the road for a better life. In the beginning of the video singer/guitarist Dana Stern is indulging in a reading diet of Jules Verne’s pioneering work of science fiction, 1870’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Andre Norton’s 1952 post-apocalyptic science fiction classic Daybreak 2250 A.D. and Betty Friedan’s 1963 feminist landmark The Feminine Mystique. All significant choices as each involve daring to imagine a better future and working toward one but also knowing there can be one. Heady stuff for a roughly two and a half minute punk song but it gives an added dimension of meaning to what the song and the band is about and the use of music and art as a vehicle for maybe making a more humane and vital future a possibility by creating works that embody the aspiration toward and vision of a society in which you’d actually want to live. Watch the video for “Time Machine” on YouTube, connect with JJCnV at the links provided and give a listen to the group’s new EP Stays Up Late, which includes “Time Machine,” which released on Bandcamp on May 8, 2020.