About a decade and a half ago, Vektroid raised
it as a beacon and magnet for recognition of the existential ennui gripping those carried out to sea in the first wave of America's lost decade (still ongoing) in the wake of a major financial crash, and then Fire-Toolz optimized
it to supercharge her caustic, rainbow-stained death spiral, leading to a badly realized and spotty cottage industry of extreme metal and punk bands trying to sound like the prime reference for their riffs were modernist watercolor prints found on the walls of dental offices nationwide (imitation is flattery, but it's also facile), and now it comes to this... all the hip, audacious, and circuitous routes have been trodden to the point that they have carved bleak, cavernous trenches and lightless, fallow gouges of no-man's-land into the culture; yet,
it remains! So what to do with
it? The only remaining ingress to the bounty of this small, fertile pasture is to step over the gate and waltz in like Big Chungus Bugs Bunny waddling into a vegan bakery with a hankering for a slice of cruelty-free carrot cake. The only thing in stock, though, is jazz- sweet, blithesome, impossibly pearlescent new-age fusion jazz, that's
it! As the stars would have it, the kind of jazz that Rochester's TrndyTrndy curates and composes on
Virtua was always the Fiddler's Green you pined to chart-wheel, thrown barefooted in your less guarded and honest moments of reflection- a plateau of fountainous mirth and charismatic intrigue, where knowledge is abundant and the future is as wide open as the horizon at dawn. TrndyTrndy is able to be the architect of this sonic encarta of bright, flawless forms, malleable flesh-marble, and dazzlingly synthesized auditory-tactile synesthesia despite being in their early twenties, and therefore likely never directly experiencing the era of
Eyewitness CD-ROM guided tours of natural phenomena and archaeological investigations which serve as the aesthetic womb and inspiration for the project. They've dauntlessly condensed, extracted, and purified its primary essence, meaning that through the internet, all time is flat and abstract. You are 12, you've just hopped off the bus and are returning from school, your parents aren't home so you blow off your assigned school work and boot up the family computer, run a DOS executable from a digital encyclopedia, and spend the next two hours exploring a Smithsonian-sized archive of facts and photos about large jungle cats. You are 78, the young woman who brings you your pills in the afternoon has a playlist streaming on her phone and it is feeding music into the wireless headset in her ears, you accept the paper cup she hands you when she stops at your room, you pause and examine the contents of the cup, "Do I get the red pill today?" you inquire, she takes one of the earbuds of the headset out of her ear and asks you to repeat your question, the music pulsing out of the soft nub of the headphone is loud enough that you can hear it ring through the doorway without adjusting your cochlear implant, the sounds are sweet and comforting, familiar even, your memory is jogged but the recollection is so buried and long-forgotten you doubt its veracity as it has the clingy fuzziness of a hallucination... something... something about tigers? These worlds coexist, yours and everyone else's timelines have folded, and
Virtua is the seam of the hinge where time and space collapse on their premises. It's all coming back to you now, isn't it?
