AQNB releases the Out of Body mini-compendium, a download-only album of new music and visual works today, October 12.
The compilation—with cover art by Margaret Haines—features artists found in AQNB’s orbit, whose contributions reflect a notion of sound and art in the aftermath. After enduring nearly two years of varying degrees of lockdown and myriad emergent crises, the world as we know it is unrecognisable. It’s a time of truthers and techno-mystics, where a massive gravitational shift has further weakened any shared notion of reality, already broken down by the hyperindividualism of the internet. It has led us down a path of aliens and astral projection, mass resignations and a collective dissociative fugue state. We’ve wandered out of the Age of Reason and into an Era of Enchantment.
Visual artists 4fucksakebabes and Alexandra Koumantaki deal quite literally with a haunted, internal and extraterrestrial present in their visual contributions, while producer Helica whispers the inexplicable non sequitur “…and nothing’s the same” on the unearthly hypnagogia of ‘Doorkeeper’. Other ambient and melodic music from ANIMA, shushu, and User2222 & ANDREW GOES TO HELL also flirts with these ideas of fantasy and interiority, catastrophe and chaos through their unique perspectives and sense of emotion. Together, the trans-dimensional auto reply under accelerated technocapitalism presents Out of Body as a checked-out eulogy for a year that never was.
