satellite cult 33.33
cyberdrive, X61, retro pride, webrings
welcome to this week’s satellite cult dispatch. i’m so glad you’re here. i hope the artifacts i present you with will support you as the waters of an 8-bit ocean wash over your feet. you’re standing at the edge of the water, staring out at the golden pixel sun. the world has never been so serene.
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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Cyberdive
part ambient utopian virtual, part slick hexd breakcore, this album by Ghostmemory, out on Business Casual, is all chrome and Frutiger Aero desktop backgrounds, minimalist early century tech, what Google Glass would have sounded like if it ever caught on.
☾psychic☽display☾affection☽
at times dark and droning, at others drawing from funk, even this album’s upbeat moments feel a little off, sinister perhaps, in the way a villain’s theme from a Saturday morning cartoon might. by personal ☹︎ digital ☺︎ assistant and released on net label Aquablanca 音楽レーベル, this utopian vhswave will haunt you with memories of three decade old television graphics.
ULTRA ASCENSION
this angelcore aesthetic hyperpop release by BLUEBUNNY & twinflamegirl has some roots in vaporwave and leans into the most hypnogogic tendencies of the genre. that doesn't mean there aren’t traces of happy hardcore, hexd, and cloud rap—the album is even tagged nightcore, which was a staple of my high school years that’s recently come back into fashion. ULTRA ASCENSION is bright and cult-like in its energy, choppy and pulsing and relentless.
DOING THINGS EPICLY LIKE A BOSS
this shitposting meme album by pitch master slim is asynchronous, choppy, and repetitive, drawing from acid house, breakcore, and trance. you can buy a digital copy for $1000, or you can stream it for free as the IDM gods intended.
X61
a split EP between goreshit and Lil Kevo 303, X61 is dark, ambient, driving breakcore. it’s a motorcycle chase scene in a 90s cyberpunk anime with some choppy and vaporwave (even future funk) artifacts in the mix.
takotsubo syndrome
Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or takotsubo syndrome, is sometimes called broken heart syndrome because, as far as any human physician can tell, it’s triggered by extreme emotional stress or pain. it causes the heart’s left chamber, the main one, to grow unexpectedly larger, rendering it weaker and less capable of pumping blood. takotsubo comes from Japanese, and it refers to an octopus trap.
this three track drum and bass EP by Blessu captures the racing of a heart, the struggle to stay afloat, the almost mechanical conditions of literal human heartbreak.
I HATE DIGESTION
blending breakcore and noise, this industrial, scenemo-informed released by MICROWAVE evokes a techno dungeon crawler, a warehouse of jump scares on old beige PCs.
retro pride
for those of us in New York City (and plenty of places across the globe), Pride week is coming to a close. and while IRL Pride events have become largely commercial and feel distant from the radical roots of queer liberation, online queer spaces have historically provided room for people who don’t have access to in-person queer community to form valuable bonds and receive essential support.
online queer spaces are also often riddled with bad discourse, people who lash out at their queer siblings because they haven’t unpacked their own internalized hatred, and weird hierarchies that develop from fundamental misunderstandings of foundational concepts in leftist politics. but for better or for worse, queer spaces online have become the glue that holds all of us together. i love exploring old queer websites—they’re historic documents, and unlikely zines and posters and books, they aren’t well archived.
lucky for us, The Wayback Machine can offer a window into what was. this capture of rochesterpride.com was taken in 2001. at the time, the website was intended as “the ultimate discusson forums
for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in Rochester, New York.”
a fun fact about me: i was born in Rochester and grew up not far outside the city. the queer community there will always feel close to me, whether i was sipping coffee at Equal Grounds or listening to queer elders at The Avenue Pub tell stories, running panels at the Rochester Queer Youth Conference1 as a teen GSA leader or going to meet ups hosted by Genesee Valley Gender Variants. i wasn’t specifically looking for queer Rochester history when i found this site, and sometimes all of it seems so far away. the URL now redirects to the website of Rochester, Minnesota’s Pride celebrations, and it doesn’t seem like any of the forum posts were archived. it’s so sad how much queer history we’ve lost online, but so exciting when we can still scrape out just a little of it.
webrings
i was looking for an archive of old webrings when i came across this list of new ones. the author evidently excluded any webring that didn’t meet the traditional definition.
void dive
thank you for joining me. until next time.
i tried so hard to find evidence of the conference, which was organized by the (now defunct) Rochester GLSEN chapter’s JumpStart youth leadership team—the photos are lost to time, i think.