Do androids dream of electric sheep? If they do, AKARI LD-01 is the sound of those dreams. After releasing one of the best synth-pop albums of the new decade in Moving Spaces and an ambitious concept album, Kyoto Dreams, Laura Dre continues to push her art into new directions and AKARI LD-01‘s cyber-punk synths are propelled by techno engines through a beautifully decaying future. This is music for the dystopian dance floor where humans and replicants tentatively seek some sort of connection.
Conceived in the Japanese tradition of an image album, AKARI LD-01 is inspired by artwork and the music exists within a larger artistic ecosystem that blurs the line between imagination and reality. It all starts with Xetashell Corporation, a company tasked with designing and building androids at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. Their work has reached a point where the human and androids are almost impossible to distinguish from each other and there exists augmented humans which makes it all the less certain who you are dancing with. The concept has been presented with such depth that the first person I pointed to Xetashell Corporation thought it was a real company. And that is the underlying fear that lurks on the edge of this project. Just how far into the future is this? I’m not looking for Laura Dre tour dates on Hellcore IV (the planet where this unfolds) just yet but the rapid influx of AI into our daily lives will someday come with a price.
Opening track ETERNAL shimmers with the promise of a better future as synths flicker all around the listener but HELLCORE IV proves a more menacing listen as the beats march in industrial precision. Dre paints a picture with her sonic brush and it’s one of a perfectly realized environment where nothing is left to human chance. Two other locations are featured as songs (HABITAT 5 and SHINJUKU 2.0) and they are full of tension as the beats accelerate around you. Based on the narrative, these are not places you want to find yourself as a human and the music leaves you slightly on edge.
If you did venture to HABITAT 5, you would find AKARI – a chimera hybrid of human parts and artificial intelligence. They are the experiments gone wrong, where humanity and technology come together in all the wrong ways. A dystopian-minded listener might look around the local Starbucks and see the Android phones melded to human hands and wonder if the prophecy of Project AD-01 might already be unfolding. Interestingly, the kick drum on AKARI sounds almost organic and offers one of the few moments where the music isn’t entrapped entirely by electronics. A subtle reminder that the music has a beating heart of creation somewhere in the tangle of wires and waveforms.
Named for the energy that fuels the androids, L1THIUM has a sonic viscosity that ebbs and flows like waves through your headphones. You can almost see energy bouncing between circuits on a motherboard as lights start to come on and the artificial intelligence of tomorrow comes alive. It’s a beautiful track that makes you think Xetashell Corporation is getting this right but hold on, that’s exactly how they fool us. And by “they”, I am thinking of everyone from the Meta and Elon of today to the Xetashell Corporation of tomorrow.
Ending in the heart of this world, DIVISION 3184 represents the lab where the most indestructible and combat-ready androids are being readied for duty (this one looks handy). The industrial-techno riffs build on top of each other and this is some of the most engaging electronic music since Kraftwerk first plugged in a computer and thought, let’s dance. We end the album with XETASHELL CORPORATION – a song the moves upwards musically as if we are climbing into the sky to reach the highest floors of the planet’s tallest building. And that is where we end the journey.
The cyber-punk noir style of the Blade Runner soundtrack feels revitalized on AKARI LD-01 and my fascination with the former undoubtedly influences how I interpret the latter. Laura Dre’s Xetashell Corporation might be a modern-day Tyrell Corporation where their pursuit of technological advancement ultimately leads to the loss of human identity. Much like her previous work, Dre challenges the listener to enter an entire world of imagination and that might be a steep ask for casual fans of music. However, for those of you willing to turn off the outside world and let your senses experience this fully, LD-01 is a work of incredible artistic depth that only a human could imagine. That alone will allow me to sleep a little better tonight.
Visit Laura Dre’s Bandcamp Page for more information (and order your own android?)