Leaving this world might be easy for some, and too difficult for others. Physically, for most it would require the dreams of a sci-fi writer come true (if you’re an astronaut, please take me!). Mentally, though, it’s just a matter of consuming the right amount of the right substance at the right time. “But what about music, what about books, or videogames?” you say. Well, you just need to look up or open your eyes to realize you’re still here with the rest of us, breathing the fractal routine of everyday existence. Escaping from it is certainly a common practice which we possibly will never master, but a special kind of relief comes from those moments when, out of control, we leave this world.

You’re in an indeterminate time in the future. A megalopolis surrounds you, its angular, titanic shapes constantly reminding you of gothic architecture; where people of old knelt in awe to worship a god beyond any understanding, people of now walk by and smile, knowing that it is they who are worthy of worship after building the world out of matter insignificant. A weirdly organic-looking rocket stands before you, and a steel person bids you enter. As you sit down inside, you notice the countless buttons, the thousands of parts and their process of assembly, other passengers who speak words you know – everything reveals itself as mechanical, a system constructed upon repetition, particular drones reflecting the nature of the universe in which events are but sparks flying in the infinite void of time. The rocket takes off, and soon enough you feel your machine rip apart the atmosphere, hammer the skies like a siege ram; you look out the window and find yourself “Blacking Out Through Chinese Walls” – the one wall you can look at from the earth while in the heavens, has been broken. Your thoughts come up in the same, constant electronic hums as the rocket fills your ears with the deceivingly free-style drumming of its engines in a seemingly endless jam that mimics the rigorous, expansive insistence of the outer-space landscape.

The stars fill you with relative peace, but you know this time and place is one of suffering and destruction, much like any other - except that now, there’s a mathematical precision to the flow of the apocalypse. The “Kill Command (Arc Light Operations)” bursts through the rocket’s vintage speakers. A looping morse-code message makes its intermittent, analog content clear until noisy static takes over and repeats itself in contrast to the drumming, creating an uneasy polyrhythm over the ambient-like hum of space itself, an open bassline: the command has been issued. The rocket slightly changes course and as you look out and see the gray cover of Earth you first breached through, you notice the millions of tiny explosions, the beautiful mini-novas calmly erasing everything and everyone you ever knew. After ten minutes of unyielding annihilation, all that remains is the electronic manipulation of a dead radio transmission as it slowly turns into an echo adrift and at peace in the vast realm of darkness.

You wake up, and find yourself in another megalopolis. The rocket has landed and is now empty – you walk out and see the “Super Futures Axis Neo Tokyo”: you can still hear the hum of space within you, now added to the spectral electronic voice of a fascist city born from order, from the coincidence of enhanced temporal projections droning on and on. A tribal quality drives this psychedelic explosion of metallic colors and a sky painted in ochre tones: monotony turned into a ritual, mindless machines live and die in the name of the city; this moaning, roaring manifestation of the pinnacle of progress consumes its inhabitants as they throw their arms up, roll their eyes back, and offer their lives in worship. Their souls, just like the radio transmission, slowly creep down into the sewage, the heart of all cities, and turn into electronic blips that echo away into an abyss that rivals even the one beyond the skies.

As you walk through the colossal structures, you hear a signal that is similar to a frog’s croak – an electronically simulated noise that recalls times so ancient there were still other living things around. Someone is looking for you. “The Signals From Your Radar Are Closing In On Me”, you think. This threat from a mysterious hunter beats incisively like a hip-hop piece in which urban desolation is an object of kitsch and de-centered parody: the loose, spacey bass drawing the support of the piece turns the feeling into ambience, revealing this terrible parade as something which is always there, and which is deep enough as to ‘reward’ every level of attention put to it. As you run and jump and teleport out of the radar’s range, the final explosion occurs – fire and speed turn the world into a swirling mass of force and steel; within seconds turned into decades turned into centuries, “The Sun Was Gone But Our Faces Shone”. Only burnt ruins remain; an alien, desert electronic sound fills the air with slowness a la Earth. Passing through the tranquil wasteland, it brings to our (now ghostly) attention the spurts of vegetation delicately crushing the aluminum decay in gentle drumbeats: an organic, naturalistic feminine revenge upon the skyward, masculine altars of technology, a return to the horizontal, a return to the world before it was recreated by our presence.

Our trip out of this world ends with the progressive disappearance of sounds, and the relief of escape will probably soon turn into something that will put you on your nerves. Why? Because just like most science fiction, to weave a vision of the future is in the end a reflection upon life in the here and now. Make out of it what you will, but this musical escape is not fruitless, and even though at times it can seem too long for its own good, too uneventful for its own development (krautrock electronics and ambience make for a bit of a difficult pair), it will be rewarding if you keep your imagination constantly in tune and at work – an escape that asks of you to not escape, in a sense. In any case, get in that rocket and have a good journey through this first part of a trilogy about the future, transmitted directly from the Cut Iowa Network. Travel safely!