Thought Tempo - "I Can Fila"
(2016 Zoom Lens)
Slot machines are programmed to play the three notes that make up the C major triad, (C, E, G), and no others. To shake the hand of the one-armed bandit is to become a single percussionist in a symphony of strangers, neatly arranged columns of shoulders and obscured neck-napes hunched over spinning fruits like Cistercians in the Scriptorium solemnly transcribing their texts. Whether sinking coins into a cruise ship's slots, filling an empty hall with the scrapes of a pen's tip against vellum, or even adding the rumble of an engine to rush hour traffic, entering into a state of technological communion with those in close proximity transforms the self into the unwitting instrumentalist in an industrial dronescape.
I imagine Thought Tempo's "I Can Fila" to be the concentrated tones of mass-transit clamor and unheard earbud transmissions broadcast within it captured by a yet-to-be invented vocoder, then re-arranged into an imposing construction of stainless steel footwork. It's the fossilized remains of Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" discovered within an outer wall of your local Internal Revenue Service branch's new cyberpunk office building.
