BBJR / ARU “Europe 2172” C37 (Personal Archives)

 


I know what I’ll be doing in the year 2172: chilling in the literal afterlife. What about you guys? For Bob Bucko Jr. and ARU, they’ll be fresh of their sold-out, co-headlining European tour, each decompressing in a separate mansion while already germinating the ideas of their next collaboration. Bodies full of legal, mind-altering substances. Evolved craniums pulsing with creative energy.
 
Imagine that, Europe still existing in 2172! So rich.
 
BBJr. and ARU – aka long-running Dubuque project of Randy Carter – predict the future here on Europe 2172, an imagined artifact of that glorious triumph of live performance. Bucko tinkers with his gadgets and guitars, his pedals gleaming in the setting sun, melding generous ragas with future meditative jams, all but forecasting what we’ll all be listening to 150 years from now. (Well, those of us who haven’t been raptured, that is.) ARU dares to turn the tables on BBJr., entering with some milky dub that curdles and spills all over the gears and circuits, clouding everything purply, shimmying and shuffling in dizzying chaos. But this is what the 2172 kids are clamoring for – or their clones are anyway, who’s to say which is which, especially from a legal standpoint. ARU delivers. BBJr. delivers.
 
Our future is once again less bleak. Our past selves from 2021 are grateful that either Bucko and Carter are clairvoyant or time travelers. Either way, we benefit.
 
https://bobbuckojr.bandcamp.com/
 
https://arumusic.bandcamp.com/
 
https://personalarchives.bandcamp.com/
 
--Ryan