Adam Stone, Dead Sea Apes, Black Tempest

Dataland is a collaboration with Black Tempest and Adam Stone, achieved mainly through internet data transfer during the Covid lockdown of 2020. Insistent, evolving electronic sounds encounter a variety of guitars and percussion, from the clockwork kosmische of "Lost Hours" to the stumbling noise dub of "Shop Soiled", while Adam Stone's words meditate on life in the post-industrial west, our increasingly atomized and data-driven society and its logical conclusion in a corporatized dystopia. Dataland is a meditation upon the average existence of a "developed-world" human in the early 21st century. Whilst not struggling with the harsh physical demands of industrial labor as we did in the recent past, our plight continues to embody the melancholia and confusion of alienation. Under the bewildering complexity of rationalized social and economic systems, we may indeed have become unwitting prisoners within, what the sociologist Max Weber termed, "the iron cage of bureaucracy" - tripping the minutes away in a daily pantomime of data-driven surrealism. This six-song collection is a fusion of electronica, monologue, "real drums", and guitar, and was recorded at various locations in sad old England over the last two years or so. An almost psychedelic sense of puzzlement, nausea, and fatigue accompanies being lost in the omnipresent number-generating machines and anti-human modelling systems that now run our world. This is the realization that defines the essence of the album - that your life is now only as real as what is displayed on the screen of your constant technological companion.