This album is the first of a series of installments loosely inspired by the book The Stack by Benjamin H. Bratton.

The project started from the modest idea of bringing some life to the vast amount of undeveloped snippets of music, lying long forgotten in my hard disk, by turning some of them into actual tracks to be quickly released, without any underlying inspiring concept. The plain, unambitious, drawer-emptying spirit of the operation was somehow relaxing and this helped the music flow rapidly. So, while ruminating about a possible accompanying artwork, I kept on with this unpretentious attitude and decided it would be based on an “architectural” illustration style, particularly cities depicted in stylized isometric view, for no other reasons that the sense of comfort and coziness these always inspire in me.

In the meantime, for motivations unrelated to music, I stumbled into The Stack book and became quickly obsessed with it, at the point I decided to adopt it as an inspirational framework for a series of releases, each of which associated to one layer of the multi-level structure presented in the book. I started from layer 3, the City, which smoothly, and coincidentally, connected to the architectural thing I was already into.

Accordingly, I got back to the then almost finished tracks, in an attempt to emphasize a certain “blocky” quality, yet finally ending up in a loop of obsessive revisions driven by confused intentions, i.e. precisely what I meant to avoid in the first place. Similarly, the artwork I’ve been developing, a generative design of a city in isometric style, due to errors in the code I wrote, deviated from the clear, ordered view I was after initially, turning into a messy picture of wrecked structures.

Then, what I got eventually was an exercise in accidental design, where music and images inspired, and at the same time were influenced by, the concept of a proto-futuristic city, maybe called Nullville (or Zeroville, or Omegapolis). Funded on lack of basic knowledge in urbanism or architecture, as well as superficial misinterpretation of radical architecture experimentations of the 60’s, such as Archigram’s Plug-in City, the design of Nullville (or New Rome City, or 新坏城市) is based on the systematical negation of the common constructing elements of futuristic urban imagination, whereas neither the neatly self-organized harmony of utopian cities, or the rigorous centrally imposed order of dystopian techno-dictatorships are here to be seen.

The music similarly reverts the optimistic, self-expansive principles underlying the urbanist utopia of Archizoom Associati’s No-Stop City, rather continually all-stopping and detouring, a manifesto of creative confusion and lack of clear procedural method. Simple recognizable structural patterns are assembled in an irrational, a-functional way that leads to no fully justifiable topological order, being neither completely dancey nor experimental. Omni-present, a-linguistical, synthesized vocals, somehow resembling the way characters speak in Animal Crossing, are juxtaposed to pumping bio-industrial sounds, conjuring up a displacement of the forgiving citizenship model of the game into a 90s-styled cyberspace urban setup, maybe managed by a clumsy, dysfunctional AI, which, unlike most of its zealous colleagues (e.g, the Jody featuring in the Steel Sky game series), is incapable of either controlling its citizens or providing for their well-being, or anything else in between that could raise an interesting ethical dilemma.

Far from being driven by gloomy pessimism, this work is intended as a satire of the limitations of human capabilities in control and design, mocking things like pompous claims of “Smart city” policies actually implemented through convoluted Excel sheets, macro-management programmes fiascos resulting in micro-fragmentation of individual responsibility, and, finally and mostly, my own incapability of sticking to any form of clean, disciplined and productive creative process.


References:

B. H. Bratton - The Stack | On Software and Sovereignty - thestack.org

Archigram Plug-in City - www.archdaily.com/399329/ad-classics-the-plug-in-city-peter-cook-archigram

Archizoom Associati No-Stop City - architizer.com/blog/practice/details/archizoom-retrospective/

Superstudio - www.cristianotoraldodifrancia.it/superstudio-history/

Animal Crossing, SimCity, and the Long History of City Planning in Games - egmnow.com/animal-crossing-simcity-and-the-long-history-of-city-planning-in-games/

Beyond a Steel Sky Interview - gamingbolt.com/beyond-a-steel-sky-interview-premise-structure-length-and-more

www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegriffiths/2013/12/02/city-cynic-against-the-smart-city-by-adam-greenfield-review/?sh=15fca17a3b19