2057 is a collaborative sound project by artists Mark Amerika and Cecyl Ruehlen. Recorded inside the techne_lab at the University of Colorado, the album remixes Amerika’s spoken word poetry with Ruehlen’s experimental jazz compositions. The artists came up with the title, 2057, after having read various texts and manifestos related to the recent movement known as Accelerationism. One book the artists were particularly drawn to was Capitalist Realism, a document composed by the late Mark Fisher aka k-punk.

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” writes Fisher in Capitalist Realism, but what would an alternative to the Über-Capitalist End Times actually sound like? Riffing on Capitalist Realism’s subtitle, “Is There No Alternative?”, the artists have composed seven unique music tracks that feature a new style of music they have tagged cyberbop jazz poetics.

The wiggy jazz sounds that weave through the experimental compositions create a unique musical style that are heavily influenced by artists such as Ornette Coleman, Horace Silver, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor. And yet the artists clearly come from a different, post-punk lineage and their aesthetic style resonates with the DIY culture usually associated with the underground noise and performance art scenes.

The end result is a work that can be experienced as a cyberjazz concept album that is part sci-fi manifesto, part hypermasculinist sex poem, and part ontological framework for a New Temptation Outside of Being. 

​

​

credits

released March 9, 2018

Release Date / March 9 2018
-2057-
Written, Composed & Recorded by:
Mark Amerika & Cecyl Ruehlen
Recorded at Techne_Lab // Boulder CO // USA
Cover Art by Jenny Odell
Book Design by Antonia Pinter
Master Engineering by CW Mossholder