Chongqing, China, one of the largest municipal districts in the world, may rightfully have laid claim to the title of Cyberpunk Capital, earned through its advanced technical sector and neon-future landscapes, but the soundtrack of the nigh-approaching total-techno dominion is transmitting across sea and air, out of the leaky boiler rooms and dank basement dens of Barcelona. It's the future, baby! ...of a distant past. What Spanish FM synthesis and electro-punks Sistema de Entretenimiento are excavating are already decayed and tarnished remnants of tomorrow in the ashes of today. Squaring the freshly freed angst of the post-Franco '80s into a pixelated, soft-tooth buzzsaw of oscillating lo-fi disco puntazos, they construct with sound a virtual vision of the 21st century from the vantage point of far-flung yesteryear that is more advanced and exciting than the one we find ourselves mired in the depths of, but nevertheless, just as desperate and disquieting. A prophetic fever of fortress-like, chrome-gleaming skyscrapers so tall that they literally pierce through to the void of space and are in constant threat of colliding with satellites; widespread commercially available cybernetic anatomical augmentations and back-alley butchers licensed to install them for bottom-barrel prices; rogue killer androids; flying cars; android spouses and electric sheep- their oneiric implications nearer and auspicious promises farther away today than they were when the now-diseased circulars of mass-market paperbacks and VHS OVAs articulated their conceivable emergence- at least on the Western half of the globe. I guess that's why EPs like
Arcade Punk seem so prescient; they're paving the night with percolating neon-noise-tinted excess in anticipation of a future that will never arrive, but is somehow already receding in the rear-view mirror.
The United States has the highest carceral rate of any country in the world, and yet Prison Records is based in Spain. Curious...
