Endgame of the Anthropocene marks Talibam!’s return to ESP-Disk', a
partnership begun in 2009 with the highly acclaimed Boogie in the Breeze Blocks
album. Talibam! is a 14-year working unit based in New York City that can be
described in various ways – as a classic keyboards/drums expanded-jazz duo,
as Dadaist provocateurs with an innate love for the history of music, as a
Fluxus-informed theater troupe, as an electronic ensemble inspired by
Stockhausen, or as a rhythm section at the cross hair of agility, speed,
punctuation, and intention. Since their inception in 2003,
Talibam!’s ultimate goal has been to wed disparate ideologies through
proficiency, controversy, inquiry, and compassion. Every Talibam! album attacks
from a different angle; Endgame continues this tradition of each new release
sounding completely different from everything they've done before, as does HARD
VIBE (ESP5015), which will be released on the same day.
Talibam! has made a geopsychic prediction: after it expires in 2048, the
Antarctic Treaty System will be rejected. As the rest of the planet will have
been rendered uninhabitable due to wars rooted in overpopulation, global
warming, and the relentless exploitation of diminishing resources, human
interference and the failure to ratify will lead to
international war over the sovereignty and control of Antarctica’s vast
resources. Endgame of the Anthropocene is Talibam!’s first cinematic album of
through-composed ecogothic geosonics. It is the soundtrack to 2048’s despotic
nationalism and crumbling international infrastructure, underscoring an
eco-mercantilistic tragedy and the desperate plundering of the last pristine
landscape on Earth. This inevitable destruction of Antarctica’s purity marks
the global environmental endgame of the Anthropocene. Endgame of the
Anthropocene is a dystopian sonic pronouncement of failed socio-environmental
memes, and features Talibam!’s emergence into hyperkinetic rhythm-based
instrumental/electronic music. Syncopation via polyrhythmic electronic drum
and synth pads create corporeal dance floor beats that would make a super
computer perturbed. Kevin Shea is a master of cyber swing and ecowar rhythm —
on this record, he keeps it android yet anthropoid, like Aphex Twin meeting a
hologram Phil Collins. Keyboardist Matt Mottel anchors wide sweeps of analog
synthesis — his sonic palette oscillating between the Silver Apples, Sun Ra,
and Arca via an Arduino beta bass drop. This music is hallucinatory
composition — electronic muzik via an ethnographic sonic landscape influenced
by Parmegiani, Don Cherry, Front 242, Hailu Mergia, Vangelis, Suicide, Islam
Chipsy, Stockhausen and DJ Shadow.