Future Nature

Track Titles for Michael Brooks' 1985 Hybrid Album -- Hybrid, Distant Village, Mimosa, Pond Life, Ocean Motion, Midday, Earth Floor, Vacant.

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Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 science-fiction "future" film Solaris' opening scene shows a close-up shot of long florescent blades of yellow-green grass swaying in what appears to be slow motion, then what might be liquid wind as the camera backs away, and then finally the image fades to clear -- the grass is underwater, on the floor of a pond, and what we see is the image of the grass from above the surface of the pond, as our eyes are connected to a head that is perched on the neck and shoulders of a man who is observing the pond from outside the pond, standing at its edge. We are the eyes whose gaze is transfixed upon the pond and the swaying grass. This is the only explicit image of nature in a film about space. The image is distanced, obscured, technologized, hypercoded.

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The "hybrid" of the title of Brooks' record refers us to a specific gene-splicing of sound: from the natural, which is the sound of this moment, to the future, which is the sound of what may be, which is the projection of the world that we would hope for (or fear or already hate or have already loved). 

We may stand transfixed, too, before an image of what "nature" is when we overlap it with "future", or when we hear the sound of nature spliced into future. In our dystopic, endlessly realistic dreams, it may refer to a world where nature is dead but preserved. Or alive but dangerous. Or finally done away with as we had always wanted. Or perhaps we finally have a reason to really live as we once would have, before the city laid waste to the mountains.

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The "sound" of "nature" in music originates with our idea of the "acoustic instrument" -- stringed, drummed, breathed, hammered. These sounds begin in a village, which is where women and men and children live together in a collective home. As soon as you plug something in and electrify it, nature recedes, the volcano scatters the village inhabitants into distant atomic parts. As soon as you plug something in and electrify it, the village is the city, the city is the planet, the planet is the to-be-colonized white fire surrounded by a raging inferno of nothingness.

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If there are any acoustic instruments on Hybrid, they are buried deep within the sound -- you would need some sort of hyper-magnification technology brought back from the future to extract them and restore them their originary status. The music seems to only reference, by way of its sound, things in nature like grass, or the ground, or the sea, or the day. No one is there to witness this nature, because this nature is what stands apart from us. Even if we look directly into its eyes, we don't see it as anything but othered.

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Solaris is a story about a man who takes a spaceship into space and ends up imprisoned in the deep guilt of his flypaper unconscious. He may as well remain under the water, the grass filling his mouth with projected reality.

Hybrid is a record that sounds like the nature that will outlast us, even if we live side-by-side amongst it. Can you imagine a day that you aren't actually inside of when you imagine the images of the day -- the fusions, that village, those flowers, that living pond, the moving ocean, those shifting day times, that surfaced earth, these no ones. Hybrid is the sound of an emergency crashing calmly into the sun, building a village there whose ashes are the remnants of every new day.

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(Further information on Michael Brook can be found at his website. His other records all showcase different aspects of his performing, composing, and production abilities. Hybrid, however, is a unique work that imagines a future that lies far beyond, and external to, us -- (humanity, I mean)...)