Polinski – aka 65daysofstatic’s Paul Wolinski – is set to release his new solo album ‘Telex From MIDI City’ next month. Employing a variety of ageing electronic music sounds and styles – such as analogue synths, MIDI, 90s IDM beats and more – he has attempted to create something that sounds up to date and free of the nostalgia with which they are usually imbued.
“I have an increasingly conflicted relationship with technology”, he says. “I love working with computers. The way I can use them to make music and glitch things feels like an extension of myself and makes me able to articulate things that I could not otherwise express. But I am deeply uneasy about technology as contemporary socio-political force”.
“I don’t believe technology is going to save us”, he goes on. “I think the internet is getting increasingly worse and the social media platforms are alienating us from each other and turning us into free labour for their advertising algorithms. I think that AI and a lot of machine learning devalues and misunderstands the creative process, and will alienate artists ever further in its quest to reduce art into endless, ephemeral content for the churn of the internet”.
“The late, great anthropologist David Graeber said ‘the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently’”, he continues. “And so that’s what this record is. Not sci-fi escapism or nostalgia for a world that used to be, but an imagining of this world we are in right now, just done differently. Or a soundtrack to this other world. Or perhaps a soundtrack to a map that points toward it”.
“I wanted to re-appropriate old technologies – MIDI, 90s IDM beats, 80s synths – reclaim them from the retro, lazy, desperate nostalgia that the internet is drowning in, and point them toward a future that isn’t in front of us, but rather blooms out of us in some better, non-linear way”, he explains. “Or at least demonstrates that progress is a lie. That there is no future in the way that we are told that there is. And that this can be a hopeful thing”.
‘Telex From MIDI City’ is set for release on 24 Feb. Watch the video for opening track ‘Distant Friend, I Love You’ here:
