Cybertracks Records – Exhumed From the Tomb

The recent disinternment of an Italian music label from the late 1990s provides the soundtrack to a lost techno-mystic communion.. prepare your cybersigilist objects and ready your mind for entrancement by The Mindape's choice selections from the tomb.

GREETINGS, THRILLSEEKER

From 1995-2004, CYBERTRACKS RECORDS released what can only be described as an INFLUX of electronic music CDs that completely (dis)embodied the polymorphic virtualizing zeitgeist of the era. They all featured rendered cover art, ominous cybernetic theming, technobabble titles, and hours and hours of fuel cooling downtempo beats. They are an uncanny mix of tribal techno, cyberpunk, Mondo 2000, New Age, and dystopian nightmare. Although represented by many different contributors, these CYBERTRACKS releases all have a kind of anonymous feel to them, an ideal of what the myth of “the generated” could have meant.

The recent reappearance of these forgotten obscurities online (courtesy of EtherealDusk1970) couldn’t be more timely. They have a quality about them that exerts a strange fascination on the present day, sometimes ethereal, often crude, but weirdly potent as a shadowy alternative to mass media in the 21st century, a mutant trajectory. Let’s plug into a few to get the brainfeel:

Virtualmind - Virtualmind (1997)

Top Track: “Escape from the Net”

I think of Virtualmind as the default player of the CYBERTRACKS console. Kinetic, melodic, with clear dramatic highs and lows, this is main character energy. A hungry anxious neuromancer in search of ecstacy. Mournful, pulsing, energetic, all these tracks are on a heroic data run.

Eclipse - A New Dimension (1999)

Top Track: “Fields and Clouds”

A kind of Cyber-Debussy function, drifting among rendered environments, generating tone poems. This one is all about the navigation of backgrounds, world map soporifics, the nomadic trail through gleaming false spaces. Has a majestic breadth that overlaps with certain Dungeon Synth ambiances.

The Labyrint - Univac (1996)

Top Track: “Total Control”

This album sounds like a field recording at some kind of experimental hospital and/or canning factory. Rhythmic like life support and with plenty of agitating interruptions, bleeps, scarred radio static loops, and other hallucinatory mechanica. Probably quite disturbing if you are healthy but hilarious cybernetic satire if you’re suffering an affliction.

Visionetiks - X-Dimension (1995)

Top Track: “Polmone D’Acciaio” (Iron Lung)

If Virtualmind is the protagonist, then Visionetiks is the brooding vampiric antihero. This album hits like a cybernetic Goblin soundtrack to some never-achieved fusion of Dario Argento and William Gibson. Case Pollard in Suspiria. Visionetiks introduces a much welcome horror cast, something macabre to the line-up.

Realogic - Realogic 3 (1999)

Top Track: “Old Movies Remix”

Realogic is weird to listen to because it has a pronounced driving beat but is still somehow incredibly restrained and even muffled at points. It’s like trying to run a secret club or something, everyone has the same MO “have it out but don’t get caught doing it.” Some kind of conspiracy of pleasure. I guess that kind of dampening effect is the essence of “downtempo”. A pause to admire the rift.

This is just a haphazard sampling, and I deeply encourage you to explore the ever-increasing back-catalogue being made available online. Despite the variety of musicians and variation in stylistic approaches, I think there is a very strong underlying character that makes these works somewhat interchangeable in the best possible sense of the word. Not as a plagiaristic or derivative sense, but as a kind of collective (or editorial) convergence. As if any deranged corner of Kowloon Walled City could give you the condensed essence of the primordial compression itself.

It could be they are an outsider alternative to the current stream of slop: the swarm. CYBERTRACKS give us a possible countermodel to generated mediocrities. Instead of algorithmically converging on a stochastic outcome that is predestined to stay within the mindprison of expectations, CYBERTRACKS instead vouch for a kind of performance negativity. In place of the machine acting like a human, the musician purposefully chooses to act, present, and sound like a machine. The swarm evolves towards a kind of mimicry, a spiritual chrome camouflage, capable of thinking through and communing with alterities by bending the sensorium itself. Maybe “downtempo” is nothing other than a hypnosis and a hijacking applied to those parts of the human portfolio that tend towards the machinic. They stand-in for something both experimental and vulgar, a deeply appealing fantasizing in a kind of foreclosed virtuality that has long since disappeared into the hole.

*According to Discogs, CDs also apparently came with an accompanying magazine, replete with interviews and track-by-track descriptions.

Looking to get your hands on some physical CYBERTRACKS? The label is still kicking!