When stories are told in 50 years, it might sound like this: “0100 1101 0110 0001 0110 0100 0110 1001.” Digital dialogues, quite melodic and rhythmic, but incomprehensible for humans.
Ah, the people! As if it would still matter in half a century. The trio DLÉ – that’s Florian Hertweck, Tim Kapper aka Jaques Tabaques and Malcolm Kemp aka Kemo – catapults its listeners into a future in the very funny, very linguistically playful musical trash sci-fi radio play “Wack to the Future”, in where people are very comfortable – but also very dull.
DLÉ: Wack to the Future. 1 CD or 1 colored double LP, 52 minutes. Kreismusik, Dresden 2022, 15 or 29 euros.
(Photo: circle music)
Bots take care of the essential things. People who still have a regular job themselves are somehow disreputable. The big picture is controlled by MADI, the Multiple Artificial Individual Intelligence. “Earth’s population is regulated / Earth’s resources are well dosed / Environment and climate controlled / Sickness and infirmity eradicated.”
What follows is great boredom. Which is only interrupted by the so-called detonations. Then all bots are deactivated for a few seconds. People are completely defenseless for less than a minute. Which they can no longer deal with. Renato almost goes insane, at that moment he thinks he is losing his child and feels abandoned by his wife Jeanne Kran – in this future it is the men who bear the children.
But everything goes well, at least for the two and their unborn child. Not, however, for the director of the Museum of Ancient Technology, which Renato and Jeanne are currently visiting and which exhibits what was the (ridiculous) state of development fifty years ago, that is, in our present. The director is murdered, and because the MADI can’t access any data because of the reset bots, Mrs. Inspector, as Jeanne is occasionally called, has to investigate in the classic way.
But the crime plot is only the catalyst for a wild ride. Because this musical concept album is about a lot: the relationship between the sexes, the question of the extent to which people still master technology and not the other way around. Yes, to the question of how we want to live in the future.
“Wack to the Future” is a fast-paced, allusive satire, word jokes and jokes are the language of choice. But musically the radio piece also has good dynamics – electro mixes with bass runs, the lyrics are rapped in a soft way.
The play has already been performed on theater stages under the title “Android Ergo Sum”. It was broadcast as a live radio play at the ARD radio play days in Karlsruhe in mid-November. However, the comedy also works very well on a purely acoustic level. Not least because all the bots are ultimately human creatures. They are therefore quite similar in key properties. The salient one is, algorithm aside, run-of-the-mill stupidity, its unpredictability.