Greetings from sunny Technopolis, biters! As we write this n0teeth is briefly resting our feet after a couple of days spent wandering around Tokyo awestruck by the architecture, gazing up at the city's vertical monuments to its economic boom in jetlagged wonder like a kid in a sweet shop. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, our South London faves PC World have just dropped their new EP Infinite Dream Weapon, the highly anticipated follow up to 2021's Order, which you'll acquire before Bandcamp Friday is over if you know what's good for youse.
The lads have, in short, pulled it off again. The haunting Fairlight stabs, the boom and clap of the drum tracks, the bright, punchy melodies - all the PC trademarks are present and correct, without ever making the thing feel formulaic. Every surviving grey cell in my skull is straining to remember which 80s EBM band PCW reminds me of and drawing a blank. They would have fit comfortably on bills alongside Portion Control and Buried Dreams era Clock DVA (***STROBE WARNING***), but they don't sound quite like either band. They share some aesthetic, thematic and musical ground with contemporaries Klack and Multiple Man but like those acts they have defiantly carved out their own niche in the current stack of 80s revivalist synth and EBM acts.
Opening track At Heaven's Gate got us hyped for this release months ago, but the other two original offerings here are more than worth the wait. The detuned synths on the title track recall a mercifully short-lived 2010s musical fad called "vapourwave" (ask your idiot k-head older brother who used to spend too much time on tumblr), but while vapourwave seemed content to wallow in the past, PCW sound like they're trying to fight their way out of it. They're not resigned to living in hypercapitalist disappointment, they're seizing the technology - the Fairlight, the Telex, the Microcomputer and the chunky mobile phone - and bashing their way through the smoked brown glass that seeks to imprison us in a permanent 1989. A world of broken dreams, inflation and austerity; a postmodernist fake marble monument to one-way excess.
Maybe I'm just reading too much into some catchy 80s-influenced synth tunes, or maybe I'm reading too much into recurring dreams I have about being stalked through Canary Wharf at night unable to find an exit or scream. Or maybe it's just that I read Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism precisely once and now I can't even dream of a world without neoliberalism. The most likely explanation is that PCW's music really is just so evocative it can trigger all kinds of things in the listener's imagination that may or may not really exist. Someone out there might be listening to these tunes and thinking about another life they might have had tending cattle in idyllic Alpine bliss, the tinny drum machine and synthesiser sounds filling in for cowbells and horns. I don't think I will ever fully understand what draws me to this peculiar sweet spot in the electronic music continuum and I hope I never will. The magic is in the mystery, imprinted on our collective subconscious like arcane hieroglyphs on a circuit board.
The Bandcamp page for this release suggests it is merely a taster of a full-length album coming next year. The future is dark. The future is PC World.