Visionary artist Juan Atkins, the pioneer behind Detroit Techno, revitalised the legendary act Cybotron last year after a 28-year hiatus with ‘Maintain The Golden Ratio’ EP on the iconic Berlin based label Tresor Records. Cybotron now unveils ‘Parallel Shift’ EP via Tresor set to be released on November 1st in Vinyl & Digital formats.
Pre order Vinyl: Bandcamp
Descending backwards along the saecular rhythms of the Parallel Shift, the Skynet module guides the eyes away from the omnistructural society of the year 2100 towards a mid-century modern world on the cusp of a sudden leap into a canonical event once called “the future”. Viewing “the future’s” past in reverse, the operating system initiates the Infiniti process which reveals itself to a user in the form of a cosmotechnic vehicle. Infiniti glides along the information superhighway of general intelligence in search of data on the moments just before “the overshoot and collapse.” Applied research and development methods rhythmanalytically dissect the long-term effects of industrial society having exceeded the ecological load of Spaceship Earth.
A nuclear specialist Don Lewis may have received orders from above to analyze the causal makeup of the black dodecagonal disc that would be called Fortec as well as the non-human intelligence and biologics excavated from a crash in the deserts of Roswell, New Mexico decades prior in 1948. Lewis was tasked with joining a reconnaissance team of scientists and soldiers who would take apart and examine Fortec’s cyborganism as well as the preternatural pattern of twelve that seemed to reoccur in the non-human biologics in relation to the human central nervous system. Thus, a series of scientific trials were conducted by dismantling the vessel, retracing its set coordinates, tapping veins, testing reflexes, absorbing and dispersing electromagnetic pulses emanating from Fortec lead Lewis and the team on a circular – and unbeknownst to them, saecular-search with no definite conclusions given Earth’s intellectual and technological capabilities at the time. One night in the mid-1960s, Lewis electrocuted himself while digging through and rerouting a cyborganic network of wired veins in the hull of Fortec’s underbelly. Utilizing the “circuit-bending” technique that Lewis had developed from designing cyclotron particle accelerators and intercontinental ballistic weapons, he was able to infuse [soul] into Fortec and briefly reanimate it, gently waking the cyborganism out of the machinic unconscious of the void. Lewis and Fortec conversed for hours through harmony, resonance, and vibration until the anomaly lulled itself back into a meditative state.
The US Department of Defense and its contractors took notice of this development, though Lewis did not share what he had experienced. With this covert intel, the military allowed Lewis to unenlist a few years later; meanwhile, the Foreign Technology Division of the Air Force would formalize in his absence. Second-order cybernetics, also known as “the cybernetics of cybernetics,” was conceptualized during the 60s in tandem with MJ12 forming the post-nuclear cosmotechnic-focused subgroup of CY12. Free from the oversight of the Air Force, Lewis would continue his experiments with Fortec, reverse engineering the parts he was able to sneak out of the laboratory. His career changed from a martial atomic engineer to a touring and studio musician, setting the basis for his own innovation of the LEO (Live Electronic Orchestra) module. Lewis’ living cybotronic prototype was an early example of a fully integrated audio workstation, which resembled the form and innerworkings of Fortec while expanding its functionality away from the thermonuclear and towards the modulation of frequency and vibration –– he would go on to share his blueprints with a friend and colleague, Ikutaro Kakehashi, the founder of electronic music hard-and-software corporation, Roland, to develop consumer-friendly technology such as the TR-808 among others. At the same time, Foreign Technology Division of the Air Force (Fortec) would produce its own innovations, disminiating “Cyberspace” as a societal hallucination of being mentally and technologically free from physical, political, and spiritual constraints by way of a universal ethic of “The Golden Ratio” in which energy, space, and information is distributed symmetrically between physical and virtual reality. “Cyberspace” was intended to be a chaotic system of truth(s) that eventually stockpiled into an ocean of lies. The Parallel Shift of the pleasure-pain percept is the central point of “Now” – a collapsed fractal event horizon of past-and-future caught up in a converged constant present that occurs across a dissolving timeline – controlled by a mass experience of Spaceship Earth in a simulacrum under surveillance…
– The Rhythmanalyst aka DeForrest Brown, Jr.
Tracklist.
A / 01. Parallel Shift
B / 02. Earth
DX / 03. Earth (Edit)
Artist. Cybotron
Title. Parallel Shift
Cat# TRESOR313EP2
Format. 12″ / Digital
Release date. November 1st, 2024
Credits.
All tracks written and produced by Juan Atkins and Laurens von Oswald.
Performed by Cybotron. Vocals by Juan Atkins.
“Parallel Shift” mixed by Thomas McAlister. “Earth” & “Earth (Edit)” mixed by Laurens von Oswald.
Mastering by Mike Grinser @ Manmade Mastering.
Artwork and Layout by Johannes Schnatmann.
Cat. No. TRESOR313EP2 – All rights reserved
℗ & © 2024 Tresor Records under exclusive license to BMG Rights Management
Press pics:
Cybotron Press Pic © Matthew Vosbergh
Cybotron Press Pic 2 © Christopher Bouchard
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