Anyone with a seemingly nuclear-powered sound system in their vehicle might consider this record handy to breach urban noise-pollution levels, while simultaneously getting a sleek dose of dub, paranoia, poetry and science fiction.
Presumably because that's what people do, Spaceape includes a list of cultural influences on his MySpace page. It's faintly comforting to sense his appreciation of Solaris, Maya Deren, La Jetée and William Burroughs, though creating enduring work is approximately 23 times trickier than recycling notions of implanted memories, time travel, tribal hypnotism, cultural conquest and viral prophesy. Good starting points though, and there are enough twists and turns away from mechanical sleekness and unsentimental bombast on Memories of the Future that even a future Hyperdub release titled Plague Meshes from the Red Pier of Yesterday under the name Dr A Messenger would get my attention. Someone not on Spaceape's list (or Kode9's) is Keith Hudson; though nevertheless the bones of his skeletal shadow hang over both this record and much of the music that we could call Genre:Noir; since making tangential tributes to French actors is fun, but also because there's a point beyond which language incestuously consumes itself, and hopping, tripping and stepping with or without a drum through a bass jungle of dub grime to find a genre-appropriate label for recorded sound, can seem meaningless. Recognized or not, Hudson's unique, lithe, tough sound remains as influential as that of any dub artist or producer.
The other, acknowledged, influence on this record is the great Linton Kwesi Johnson, often described as a "dub poet." Maybe I just love the smell of pedantry in the morning, but in the original conception of dub, a b-side of a song was made with partially erased vocals, added reverb, echo and other effects for a stripped down, stretched, and sometimes, I would argue, psychedelic version. While that practice hasn't gone away completely, the construction of a dub edifice without the process of erasing (case in point: Echo Base Soundsystem) is commonplace, and indeed while LKJ's music is composed as if sculpted from subtractions, his words aren't generally erased, and their meaning is never sacrificed. LKJ is a bona fide poet treating words with relish, rolling sound around on his tongue, marinating intellect in hard-edged emotion, and sometimes spitting out utter perfection. To his credit, Spaceape has a fair crack at it and his voice fits this sonic landscape perfectly. Kode9's music illustrates a strand of mutant dub that doesn't always swing, has a sheen and core that seem more clinical than organic, and yet definitely retains the necessary alien allure of the exotic.
The glacial skipping and looped spoken sample on "Nine Samurai" suggests travel on a fickering, frosty, sunlit day dipping through several tunnels along the way. The track seems to interlock shimmering bleak prophesy and crackling rural superstition, erasing any discernable distance between the two. "Sine of the Dub" is a highpoint, where the opus formerly known as P.R.Nelson's finest moment, is stripped down by to muscle, blood vessel and bone, as if the suddenly ubiquitous Gunther von Hagens had harnessed his plastic preservation process to create the sound of futuristic nostalgia suitable for the headphones of the long dead. Spaceape alters some phrases where necessary. The economy is admirable and the result striking.
"Victims" is propelled by an echoing freefall quality that is superhypnotic in the sense that perhaps a driver's speed might unconsciously be influenced by the music, or they could suddenly wonder who has been driving the last few miles (a sensation beautifully articulated elsewhere by Lord Buckley on his Subconscious Mind). Perhaps less conscious than self-conscious, Memories of the Future includes four previous Hyperdub releases along with ten new tracks which achieve a depth and spaciousness that could be akin to the oddly freeing sensation of drowning or being smothered with a pillow. Whether "Correction" refers to a slight from a past love or some wider economic or racial injustice matters little compared to it's claustrophobic threat. On "Curious" an echo-soaked Ms. Haptic appears so fleetingly that the only curiosity is whether or not she actually exists. Despite her apparently being a MySpace friend of Kode9, I suspect not.
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