The robots have finally taken over. The doomsday scenarios are played out. Machine funk has been on strike, but is prepared to put its moves on show in slow-mo to show that R&B is in safe hands. This is Cameo at a half trot and Timbaland on go slow – the mechanisms of electro-funk laid bare and displayed for us to consider in an evolving micro climate. It’s 2039 and the vibrant legacies of Barry White and Marvin Gaye are from another time and place, still seducing from beyond the grave in a universe that mirrors our own, but which will always be different, on a journey to the far side of the sun.

It’s no longer enough to just lead us on to the dancefloor. Once there, we must interpret reports of new locations – microcosmic worlds, which only loosely relate to the jackings of old. Our doppelganger is an alternative planet funk, which might be as much as 50 beats per minute shy of old norms. Can we accept that the worldview has slowed, has no fixed ending and no easily mixable beginning?

The oracles have little to tell us – perhaps acceptance is the only way, as we change our expectations and succumb to a new beat, swaying in the burnt out haze of alternative suns and to the temporary solutions of new ways. The sun has lit this planet for 4.5 billion years. Records want you to believe that things are different and yet they are always the same. Look into the sun and find a new way to read.

This is future funk in freefall, Zapp in zero g, missives of an uncertain future and a difficult past, miming the coordinates of new interactions as commercial carriers take over our passage to Mars. It’s a time capsule for our alienated connections, homage to the otherness of the things we left behind – a joyous musing on R&B futures and a sunburned homage to loving the alien.

-Mark Williams-