"burn the shit DOWN"
I rang in new years eve 2026 on the homies couch watching the two and a half hour long behemoth of a cyberpunk film, Strange Days. The film itself takes place on New Years Eve 1999, in a (more?) dystopian Los Angeles, where there's a futuristic tech device called a SQUID that people put on their heads. It's a bit like steve-o's jellyfish sombrero, but instead of looking stupid and hurting yourself, it captures and records memories and physical sensations directly from the wearers brain, looks stupid, and hurts yourself, in a psychological, heady way. If you've ever played Cyberpunk 2077, it functions exactly like the brain dances in that, but unlike the synthwave type cyberpunk game Cyberpunk 2077 made in the year 2020, The post-punk type film Strange Days was made in the glorious year of our Super Mecha Death Christ 2000 B.C. Version 4.0 Beta, 1995.
(the speedmetal kind is really my shit tbh)
I won't really be giving that film the analysis it deserves bringing it up here, but I will say Strange Days is honestly a little less of it's time than say Hackers or Johnny Mnuemonic. All three of these movies released in 1995, which was apparently a real fucking banger of a year for cyberpunk films. Strange Days, even though it is not quite so gloriously dated as those films, still very much has that 90's sauce to it. The film agitates this sauce into it's climax which is set in a big ass crowd who are celebrating the coming of the new millenium. This total rager is then rudely interrupted by the vibe killer squadron themselves, the police. Now during this climax one of the main characters, Mace, performs a well deserved ass kicking and citizens arrest on two dirty crooked cops, which then triggers the rest of the donut-vaccum squadron to show up and start beating the shit out of her. There's a moment after this happens where the crowd starts to turn on the cops and starts fucking THEIR shit up in support of Mace. Unfortunately then the movie turns the neoliberalism back on and the singular "clean" cop comes and arrests the dirty cops and blah blah, but my point is that that small moment where the crowd turns on the authoritarian police, and starts exerting their own agency, regardless of whether or not they will win, *especially* in a late 90's cyberpunk sci-fi dystopia, is Field Manual by Bomb 20.
"danger!!!"
Made in 1998 and released on Digital Hardcore Records, Field Manual is also a piece coated in the late 90's sauce of it's era. It's not entirely clear from this this old ass interview I found that Field Manual specifically was made entirely on old school tracker software and shit , but knowing that some of his other stuff like female eq (shout out francine & realicide) definitely was, i'd say it's most likely true for Field Manual as well. I know I've seen some of the .mod files for bomb20 tracks floating around a couple sites, although I don't remember if any were from Field Manual specifically. This also was back when computers were still incredibly nerdy, and making music on computers was even nerdier than that. The machines that this music was made on were also incredibly primitive, to the point that even the shittiest cell phone you could purchase today would be light years ahead of these old computers. I mean, shit, the widespread adoption and proliferation of the mp3 file was occurring at the *same time if not after* these tracks were coming out. While all this was going on during the web 1.0 halcyon days, my dumbass 5 year old self was playing macromedia flash advergames like postopia or those ones on the fuckin wonka website, completely unaware of the insane distorted beats going on in the dark corners of the internet that would later influence me so greatly.
(these lowkey go hard when not having friends was the vibe)
This record feels like the fucking breakcore / digital hardcore tiktaalik that walked up out of the water and allowed us to now evolve into upright walking breakcore / digital hardcore mammalians. I don't know if that metaphor tracks, but this shit is obviously the ancestor to a whole lot of nasty, disgusting, blown out, heavy, sample-based electronic music, of whatever fucking subgenre label you'd like to call it. I'll spare you from my "subgenres are dumb" crusade, and simply reiterate this shit is wildly ahead of it's time. Now that the entry point to creating music is the lowest it's ever been, and people are out here make culturally defining tracks with a refurbished thinkpad and pirated ableton, making music on your computer at home doesn't sound so insane, but the amount of people doing it 40 years ago on fucking windows 98 is much much smaller. Not to mention the amount of people doing that and making such nasty blown out shit of this caliber had to be at most a couple of handfuls of people.
As good as Field Manual is, I'd also argue it also doesn't take itself quite so seriously. There's obviously a leftist anarchist political message, as it was released on Alec "Baldwin" Empire's DHR records, along with other lesser known rippers I'd be remiss to mention like Christoph De Babylon's "If You're Into It, I'm Out Of It" and Carl Crack's "Black Ark". Even though I have very little idea of what's going on with Alec's politics anymore since he started getting on that nft, crypto, ai, israeli, bootlicker, cyberdork, gonk, head-ass bullshit, but whether it was ever true or always artifice with Alec Empire, the anarchist bent in Field Manual is genuine. In my (apparently inadequate) research I saw that the cd comes with a booklet outlining such beliefs, although i couldn't find a scan of said booklet anywhere. This is also the same record that contains a sample from the 1990 movie Hardware of Iggy pop as Angry Bob saying "The man with the industrial dick!!". It's more the joy in rebellion rather than the sort of pure nihilism I see sometimes in shit like Atari Teenage Riot. Perhaps it's just that Bomb20 is aware and kind of okay that's it's a little corny, where as ATR has always come off sort of try-hard to me. I think in order to be true to yourself you have to be okay with looking a little silly, and I don't get quite that vibe from ATR. I also don't want to bring ATR up again and I do really want to mention this, so apologies for the brief tangent, but on the track "Street Grime" off of "Reset" Nic Endo has a couple of lines that are like "You're lucky when no one thinks you're rich // We can’t help who our parents are" which??? sure seem like something somebody with rich parents would say. I find zero evidence to corroborate my intuition of this persons parental income, but this is just something itching at the back of my mind for a few years.
"Compared to today, everything back then was an ordeal. Even the most basic aspects of making music were a hassle. But I did have one consistent ritual to decompress: I’d rent movies from the local video store, watch them, and sample the hell out of them. It’s funny to think that this tape was made entirely inside a computer, only for me to later switch to external hardware, before eventually returning to an all-digital workflow." - Bomb20
Any fucking whom, the movie sample compilations on here I think emphasize the sort of play to the destruction of the rest of the record. Blowing shit up and breaking things feels good sometimes. Especially if it's something that very clearly needs blown the fuck up. Listening to Field Manual I'm reminded of Blessed is the Flame by Serafinski, which is an incredible text about concentration camp resistance and anarcho-nihilism and also is where I first learned about the concept of jouissance, which in a gross and probably wrong explanation, is the joy of resistance for it's own sake, divorced from the goal of winning. It's the joy derived from exerting what little agency you have over the situation even if you're completely fucked and going to die anyway. Might as well go out swinging, or as the post on the cover of Christoph De Babylon's "If You're Into It I'm Out Of It" says "If you're going to go out, go out like a mutherfucka". Field manual is the audio version of the how good I'd imagine it'd feel to just fucking huck a pipebomb right into whatever the 90's version of a chat gpt data center is (evil goatee AOL? idk), consequences be completely damned. I like to imagine the cover is an already doomed rebel mech pilot's last stand against the fucking corpo-rat fascists on top of the rubble of one of those evil telecommunication corporations headquarters.
(she en on my ron till my uhhhh market uhhh collapse. idk)
Lately I've been entertaining a lot of the unhealthy last stand fantasies and thoughts about death, how to live your life, and what it means to be remembered and shit like that which I mostly blame on an incredibly poorly timed, blind, first play through of Cyberpunk 2077. I have plans to give those thoughts the space they deserve in their own piece, but I mention it here because it's parallels with the sort of individualist american exceptionalism / lone wolf / underdog mind detritus that my inner mythology of one elite guy making crazy shit at a super primitive computer carries. I hold the principle of "creativity within limitations" on a massive pedestal because I think unless you're somehow one of the 1% life is generally just a series of limitations. The 1% do still face some limitations, like human mortality (thank fucking god), but money, as stored optionality, generally shields you from the general suck the rest of us normal people have to go through. Sometimes with records I can really hear the money in the mix, almost like it's some sort of compression or effect put on the master, and this makes the music way harder for me to connect to or relate to viscerally. I have more in common with Bomb20 making music on his shitty late 90's off-white tower pc than I do with any massive pop artist or even Atari Teenage Riot to an extent. Atari Teenage Riot is doing massive fests now and even in the late 90's did a tour with Wu-Tang and Rage Against The Machine and shit. This isn't to say success is a bane against creativity or even that I hate every record made with a budget over 20 dollars but I just find working within extremely limited resources and people doing more with less far more interesting than fantasizing about being able to rent out a massive studio with vintage gear to make whatever cookie cutter indie pop bullshit people churn out now a days. Maybe it's my reverence for the hacker mindset, or maybe it's just that money can't buy taste, but I want crazier songs made on worse equipment made by normal people who are paid more to work less and i'm not kidding.
(you know i had to do it to em)
Field Manual is a both a hauntological vision of a dystopian lost future and also a totem from a very real past that did actually exist. The current big tech dystopia contains no sick mechs or cool cyberpunk aesthetics, just that awful facebook blue and white minimalism and dogshit AI ""products"" through which capitalism continues to attempt to erode any experience not explicitly designed to funnel money from your pocket to the CEOs and shareholders guilded coffers. This blown out drum break hallucination born during the end of history does contain some old esoteric wisdom for those of us still alive after history's buffer overflow wrapped the clock back around, because time is actually a flat fucking circle, and I'm ambulating the perimeter in a beat-to-fuck $500 crown vic, looking for hidden techniques to extract out of the fuzzy bits, so i can discuss them with the homies on the car phone that never seem to shut the fuck up. The "hidden technique" here is simply embracing technological limitations and creating with what you already got, and then sharing them with like minded individuals. To be hella real here, I'm holding back a massive rant about alternate systems to the current corporate controlled internet, but a lot of the web 1.0 shit like smaller labels and personal / fan / scene websites and shit are in desperate fucking need of a comeback. That's the little rebellion we can all do at least, in the anarchist spirit of field manual , is have an alternate system of information dissemination not controlled by some corporation, on some old school paper zine shit. Or at least install a fuckin ad-block or something dude, god damn.
oh yeah and also go spin that record rn cause it fucking whips lmao
-VX