The best you can be is a reflection
Keep them staring at shit
Served too softcore
Then it ain’t worth a lick
America has become a magnificent junkyard of obsolete promises, where every new technological miracle comes equipped with another way to make you miserable, lonely, and dependent on a machine that wants your money. Your phone knows your sexual preferences, your refrigerator probably has political opinions, and somewhere in California, a billionaire is teaching artificial intelligence to replace the few remaining pleasures of being alive and grounding planes in the process. Welcome to the future, comrades. Please accept the updated terms and conditions.
Into this electronic madhouse comes Boustrophedon, otherwise known as Turn The Ox, with pathOS, a debut full-length that takes several decades of industrial music, post-punk, and electronic body music, feeds them through the American meat grinder, and asks whether anyone remembers how to have a good time while civilization loses its marbles.
Originally conceived in Syracuse, New York, the project has undergone a considerable mutation since Alex relocated to Los Angeles, trading some of its earlier gothic rock inclinations for the muscular electronic machinery of DAF, Front 242, Depeche Mode, Chromeo, and early Sextile. The results suggest a collision between a German industrial nightclub, a Rust Belt factory undergoing demolition, and a particularly deranged episode of The Twilight Zone.
And what a splendid collection of contemporary diseases they’ve assembled! Social media, online dating, artificial intelligence, and the creeping suspicion that your personality has become a secondhand reproduction of somebody else’s secondhand reproduction all receive their turn beneath the examination lamp. The record’s title, pathOS, provides a wonderfully nasty little pun, suggesting an operating system infected with the miserable business of existence.
On SIM.biont, the band turns its attention toward the underground itself, where fashionable misery has become practically a cottage industry.
“SIM.biont is a bit of us taking the piss out of ourselves,” says Alex. “We see stagnation and saturation in much of the underground/dark scenes that have risen up, but we’re trying not to add to the heap. Key word, trying.”
Their self-awareness gives the enterprise its necessary dose of mischief. After all, how many people can dress themselves in black, operate a synthesizer, and deliver another lecture about alienation before somebody starts selling alienation as a subscription service?
Even the accompanying photography participates in this argument. Retro-futuristic snowsuits planted against the enormous emptiness of California’s Big Bear and Kelso Dunes suggest astronauts stranded on a planet already conquered by its own inventions. Analogue film meets digital imagery, technology confronts wilderness, and American transcendentalism gets dragged into the twenty-first century wearing protective clothing.
pathOS leaves us with a wonderfully uneasy question: How do you take part in a civilization whose operating instructions you’re desperate to rewrite? Boustrophedon’s answer: turn up the analogue machines, dance in the meantime, and figure it all out as you go.
Listen to pathOS below and order the album here
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