satellite cult 21.21

internet music, sweet soft kiss, trans reads, archiving the web

Mar 31, 2023

welcome to this week’s satellite cult dispatch. i’m so glad you’re here. i hope the artifacts i present you with will wrap you in a pink feather boa, layered over a black mesh shirt and steel chains, before teleporting you to the middle of a basement cyberpunk rave, where you will be crowned the guest of honor in preparation for making you a mechacryptid’s dinner. don’t worry. it’s considered an honor. it’s a gateway to another life.

please be aware that the void dive section below contains flashing gifs. if you’re viewing this on the website, forgive the way Substack formats some Bandcamp embeds.

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Synthetic Dreams // Falsified Reality

in this release, DrainWh0re delivers melodic, synthwave-inspired breakcore, studded with acid beats. this album takes the moment you wake up from a dream and stretches it into an impossibly infinite loop that haunts you as you’re forced to live out your day, knowing that you could be lost in a chemically-induced slumber instead.

internet music

net label coffin dance, run by catgirlgrave666, has published a compilation album featuring tracks from twenty-four producers and musicians, all in breakcore, gabber, hardcore, and other electronic genres and styles that have thrived online in recent years. it’s fast, pulsing, choppy, plundered, and atonal in all the right ways.

rerelease: ネオ東京 (Neo Tokyo)

Macross 82-99 has rereleased his classic future funk album ネオ東京 (Neo Tokyo) on Neoncity Records for its ten year anniversary. while they’re still available, you can also snag a special edition cassette.

绿色和潮湿的道路☀️: FROG TIME‼️🐸 背中どうしたの! さんありがとう👋🏼 (ベータ版 ~)

this curious EP released on Monterrey, Mexico-based label UAUH Records is a collaboration between VAAV Social Club and Chichilcitlalli. a tongue-in-cheek vaporwave-inspired collection of post-internet plundering and MIDI sounds, it playfully evokes game scores of the late 90s and early 2000s.

SSK (Sweet Soft Kiss)

a short broken transmission release by ⋆｡°✩ロストガール✩°｡⋆, SSK (Sweet Soft Kiss) plunders and chops popular songs from the early 2000s, replicating the act of a skipping CD, then winds those songs back, never allowing the listener to progress and find familiar words or notes until the producer gives permission. the result is a haunting experiment in listener autonomy.

trans reads

did you hear? Trans Day of Visibility was validated today by the White House, just in time for trans people on the ground to rebrand it: welcome to Trans Day of Vengeance. thanks to direct statements of violence leveled at transgender people, the organizers of this action canceled it due to “credible threat to life and safety.” Twitter also deleted thousands of tweets for merely referencing the event—apparently, it’s okay for accounts like Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers to harass and dox transgender people, but it’s not okay for trans people to protest legislation intended to erase us from public life.

in the name of both trans visibility and trans vengeance, i’d like to direct my fellow trans people to a valuable online resource: Trans Reads.

i first came across Trans Reads because of a sticker someone slapped on the hand dryer in a bar bathroom. the site was launched in 2019 “following increasing violence against trans people alongside the lack of accessible resources for trans people to learn about our own community,” and in the midst of the Internet Archive’s loss against major publishing houses and enthusiasm around introducing legislation like the RESTRICT Act, it feels important to highlight these resources while they’re still available to us.

restorativland

among the projects archiving the old web is restorativland, which has launched archives of Geocities and MySpace Music pages, and is working on AOL Hometown, Geocities Japan, Netscape sites, and other initiatives.

i found this page, the Gender Expression Index via restorativland, and even though the links are all dead, it serves as a reminder that to archive internet history is to archive queer history.