If memory serves sufficiently, then the purportedly imminent Singularity, such as it is envisioned in various novels by the esteemed Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan, is no more evenly distributed than is — as William Gibson put it with a characteristic axiomatic repeatability that unfortunately evades Egan — the future that is already here. Egan is the poet laureate of post-human rationalism, and in his vision, not every server farm unto which we might upload our consciousnesses runs at the same speed. There will be haves and have-nots in the post-digital future, just as there are in the digital present, and were in the pre-digital past. There will be, in the year 2050, those enjoying whatever the consensual-hallucination equivalent of retina display is, and there will be those plodding along on an old server just about capable of projecting its population as something more like virtual Lego figures. This all came to mind during a repeat listen to the chiptune collection Bit Pairat by Kupa, aka Cristian Cárdenas, who is based in Mexico City, Mexico. It opens, wisely if not uncommonly, with its strongest track, “Perdido,” which manages to be one of the best attempts ever to render dub with 8bit tools. It’s highly recommended, if only to experience the thick echoes of dub reproduced as blocky wave-like patterning.
Stream and download the full set of 11 tracks at vira-records.com. (I’d usually embed the streaming code here, but the music is hosted on Bandcamp.com, whose software player has been breaking the HTML on this site, for reasons yet to be determined.)
More on Kupa/Cárdenas at soundcloud.com/kupa, twitter.com/thakupa, and myspace.com/thakupa.