Guest Curator: Jess Levine
A cyberpunk playlist for cyberpunk times.
by Jess Levine
As a genre, synthwave fits naturally into the mold of both the storytelling “concept album” and the instrumental album. Synthwave and its brethren are love letters to the soundtracks of the Eighties cyberpunk movies from which the musical genres emerged—Vangelis’s classic score to Blade Runner (1982), John Carpenter’s accompaniment to Escape from New York (1981), and the like. Its origins as a pastiche of movie scores allows cyberpunk music to tell its stories by referencing the sonic and musical tropes employed in these scores—sometimes taking it even further through the incorporation of foley.
This playlist leans into that tradition. As you’ll likely notice, only the opening track of this playlist contains lyrical content, and even though the playlist is composed of tracks from a variety of artists, it attempts to establish a setting and narrative flow using only instrumentals. It proceeds from in media res industrial tracks and heavy club beats at the beginning, into the climactic showdown music at the center, and finally descends into the dark downtempo denouement of the back third. The stage of this playlist is set by the cinematic spoken word sketch of Deceptikon’s “The Fall of Humanity ft. He Can Jog”, from his ironically otherwise instrumental concept album “Mythology of the Metropolis.” This album, through its instrumental storytelling, was the first to make me sit back and consider possibilities of telling stories through instrumentals alone.
My most recent album “Archive”, published under the moniker Quine, attempts to accomplish the same, in a style that is firmly synthwave and cyberpunk—“Theme”, a track featured on a previous Blood Knife playlist, draws directly upon the iconic market scenes of Blade Runner, and the album’s opening cassette-click attempts to place the viewer in a specific time period and genre expectation. I hope that as you listen to this playlist, you’ll appreciate the capability of instrumentals and sound effects to speak in a language all their own, and the ways in which cyberpunk music is especially empowered by its history to accomplish this feat—conveniently, an instrumental quality also makes a playlist easier to listen to while parsing the written language of a magazine.
You may also note that this playlist transitions out of its dark ambience for the very final track, opting instead for the upbeat synthwave of the artist Waveshaper. Why? Because cyberpunk from the leftist, anti-capitalist point of view that Blood Knife itself espouses should contain a message that is, in the last instance, hopeful. I hope that In the bright brass tones and funky bass of “Endless Journey” you take away the message that the struggle may be long, but we’re working towards a victory that can be won. It’s your story. Fight on, you hero, you protagonist, you cyberpunk.
— Jess Levine
alias @jessfromonline
alias Quine
Jess Levine is a synthwave producer, writer, educator, and TTRPG designer.
