Obviously “de-evolution as progress” is the mantra of artists calling
themselves “Future Ape Tapes,” a cluster of words packed with so much
existential meaning that it becomes almost a daunting proposition to improve
upon its insinuations with additional text. But that’s where I come in, me,
dude at computer, de-evolving along with the rest of you (or e-volving? We’ll see who gets the last
laugh there), floppy word combinations of my own slapping uselessly against the
sounds constructed to light our passage into decay. Future Ape Tapes. Concise.
Not like …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead or I Love You but I’ve
Chosen Darkness. Too much overt guidance there. No imagination. The reality of
the path forward is illuminated by brevity, symbolism, and the notion of
backward compatibility, or just outright reversion. Revulsion. Revolution? No,
revulsion was right.
The future of humanity lies in its past, and its past includes the
utilization of cassette tapes on which audio information was magnetically
stored. Future Ape Tapes pushes this right to the brink of our perception,
forcing the plastic-encased information into our waiting hands to hasten its
effect on culture, the “play” button the agent that disperses the plague of
de-illumination. Sound flits, appearing, disappearing, building, cresting, like
it did when the earth was a formless void and darkness covered its face, before
the Word of God divided the darkness and the light. Oh that first literal day!
To be there and wonder, reasonless, overwhelmingly amazed at action on a
planetary scale. That’s where 1093 wants
to take us, to a place where our minds cannot set upon the solid ground of
continuity, where thought is unmoored from function and we are buoyed by the
current of pure momentum.
Devolution wrapped in paranoia and served coated in a candy Norelco
shell goes down relatively easy when administered by Future Ape Tapes, and they
have proven and continue to prove that our demise as a coherent species can at
least be an enjoyable plunge into the irrelevant. I’m reminded on “Eithernet”
of that SNL sketch where Kevin Nealon
and Michael J. Fox are in an elevator, and Kevin Nealon keeps saying “Back in
time” because of course Fox was Marty McFly in the hit 1985 film Back to the Future. It’s a cue that points
to us becoming more senseless by the day, our incessant blabbering barely
masking the idiot parrot people we’ve turned into, content to spew back what
we’ve seen on television and in other media as personal, rational thought. It’s
within the watery psychedelia of 1093
that the last pulsing brain cells of self-awareness dissolve into a carbonated
cosmic fizz, and it’s through the pleasantly prickly sensation that we realize
we’re encased in our brand new amniotic fluid, our consciousness safe within
the brain womb we’ve now concocted for ourselves. Or we’re probably not aware
of it – Future Ape Tapes is just piped over our internal PA systems for maximum
narcotizing.
--Ryan Masteller
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