FUTURE APE TAPES “1093” (Fall Break Records)




Obviously “de-evolution as progress” is the mantra of artists calling themselves “Future Ape Tapes,” a cluster of words packed with so much existential meaning that it becomes almost a daunting proposition to improve upon its insinuations with additional text. But that’s where I come in, me, dude at computer, de-evolving along with the rest of you (or e-volving? We’ll see who gets the last laugh there), floppy word combinations of my own slapping uselessly against the sounds constructed to light our passage into decay. Future Ape Tapes. Concise. Not like …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead or I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness. Too much overt guidance there. No imagination. The reality of the path forward is illuminated by brevity, symbolism, and the notion of backward compatibility, or just outright reversion. Revulsion. Revolution? No, revulsion was right.

The future of humanity lies in its past, and its past includes the utilization of cassette tapes on which audio information was magnetically stored. Future Ape Tapes pushes this right to the brink of our perception, forcing the plastic-encased information into our waiting hands to hasten its effect on culture, the “play” button the agent that disperses the plague of de-illumination. Sound flits, appearing, disappearing, building, cresting, like it did when the earth was a formless void and darkness covered its face, before the Word of God divided the darkness and the light. Oh that first literal day! To be there and wonder, reasonless, overwhelmingly amazed at action on a planetary scale. That’s where 1093 wants to take us, to a place where our minds cannot set upon the solid ground of continuity, where thought is unmoored from function and we are buoyed by the current of pure momentum.

Devolution wrapped in paranoia and served coated in a candy Norelco shell goes down relatively easy when administered by Future Ape Tapes, and they have proven and continue to prove that our demise as a coherent species can at least be an enjoyable plunge into the irrelevant. I’m reminded on “Eithernet” of that SNL sketch where Kevin Nealon and Michael J. Fox are in an elevator, and Kevin Nealon keeps saying “Back in time” because of course Fox was Marty McFly in the hit 1985 film Back to the Future. It’s a cue that points to us becoming more senseless by the day, our incessant blabbering barely masking the idiot parrot people we’ve turned into, content to spew back what we’ve seen on television and in other media as personal, rational thought. It’s within the watery psychedelia of 1093 that the last pulsing brain cells of self-awareness dissolve into a carbonated cosmic fizz, and it’s through the pleasantly prickly sensation that we realize we’re encased in our brand new amniotic fluid, our consciousness safe within the brain womb we’ve now concocted for ourselves. Or we’re probably not aware of it – Future Ape Tapes is just piped over our internal PA systems for maximum narcotizing.




--Ryan Masteller