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The whole design (typeface, 3D landscape, an Ableton-like visual arrangement of sonic blocks on the right and left, the vertiginous perspective of a space rollercoaster) harkens back to a different era of futurist imagination at the turn of the millennium – worlds apart from the hyperpolished non-binary transhumanism of certain strains of contemporary futurist sonology from the realms of hyperpop and beyond (captured in the abstract and iridescent, often clichéd 3D digital renders found on album covers).īeing a concept album that functions as a portal to a parallel aural universe, I cannot listen to it as a classic record, picking my favourite tracks and skipping the fillers. The ESRB/Rockstar Games logo mashup in the lower right corner (dubbed as Trancestar North) along with the re-appropriation of the Playstation logo into a Kode9 seal in the upper left corner trigger some profound nostalgia.

The decision to use an album cover that references late 90s videogame aesthetics speaks for itself. While Astro-Darien may be set in the near future, the impression I get from its soundtrack is a sense of cyberpunk-ish retrofuturity. Conceptualised as Astro-Darien’s soundtrack, Escapology functions as one of the many-to-come entry points into Goodman’s universe. Seemingly, everything he has been working on in the past two decades has led to his magnum opus in the making, Astro-Darien, a cross-platform ‘sonic fiction’ which presents political upheaval in a future Britain on the brink of collapse due to a resurgent Scottish independence movement, active both on Earth and in space. It has been seven years since his last LP Nothing, and about a year-and-a-half since his comeback EP The Jackpot / Rona City Blues, which foreshadowed the vibe of Escapology. In 2021, he set up an AV installation on the main floor of London’s Corsica Studios and was invited to Paris by the pioneering institution Groupe de Recherches Musicales to create a multi-channel diffusion on their fifty-speaker Acousmonium (which I had the opportunity to experience in Graz as part of Elevate Festival, and is really something else). Kode9 has also recently fully embraced his vocation as a multidisciplinary artist. His curation at the helm of the Hyperdub label has consistently been at the cutting edge.

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I believe this is something that he is trying to emulate on his latest album Escapology.Ī dubstep trailblazer who laid the foundations for forward-thinking UK club music in the twenty-first century on a series of co-releases with the late poet and MC The Spaceape. Scottish-born, London-based artist Steve Goodman has been exploring the dreadful, fear-inducing uses of sound and how it can negatively affect people at least since his book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear hit the shelves in 2009.

As a child, I did not realise how intensely the sound design in these games – the eerie atmospheres, acousmatic background noises, unsettling “save room” themes and the howling and screeching of various creatures – affected my whole being.

Back in the late 90s and early 00s, I remember sitting in a dark living room with my brothers, watching the elder of the two playing horror games like Resident Evil 2 or Silent Hill 3 and sci-fi first-person shooters like Half-Life and Quake III Arena, always on the verge of shitting my pants.

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