DAZE presents a fabricated future juvenilia. Albeit, it’s a future more present than it suggests, based upon a fantasyland, a place of make-believe — an industrial invention more real than nature itself. “Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can,” observed Umberto Eco, and DAZE is a duly fanatical and rabid land of hyper -isms, overexcited and overstimulated, where meaning is assumed by nostalgia and a nuclear proliferation of fictitious truths are passed down. Here, reality isn’t what it once was.
Sitting at the close intersection of military operations and VR, it speaks for processes of military struggle so automated that the arena is no more than arrangements on a display, a survival game in which representation surpasses actual circumstance. In that sense, DAZE is aligned with similarly concerned work across Quantum Natives’ gamesome terrain (the Quantum Natives homepage itself is presented as a gateway to an open world, tied in to Rosen’s pOrtals — a trans-media narrative that “players” can navigate).
Sonically, at its most hackneyed, Brood Ma addresses open-world exploration through a navigable survey of hardcore, grime, noise, industrial, and even a touch of skronk — the only thread being an ominous tending toward darkness or, more rawly, through sheer acceptance of disorientation and embrace of its fated survival instinct. DAZE is a collection of perverted smash hits in overdrive, a keyed up, obsessively concerned, hyperbolic exaggeration along the lines of Werkflow compatriot Recsund’s recent mix for Disjecta. “Social Re-entry” epitomizes colorings of pop overstatements through which DAZE is played out, while “Goldman Sax” is a jump-cut burst of corporate ridicule.
If it does fall short in length (?), it’s at least apt for the forum — an apocalyptic landscape affording neither time nor money to listen, let alone create — where hyperactivity is a means of surviving in a generation still working largely under its market rules. All at once, DAZE represents a hyper-wave of music competing in “a battle for survival in the nightmare undercity.” Indeed, “in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war,” and night has fallen.
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