Sex Clark Five
Rembrandt X
Records to Russia
In the Zofgx galaxy, third quaternile, fourth sun, in about seven million eight hundred thousand years, give or take an epoch, they will receive broadcasts from Earth, the first wild variety of strong signals from the planet. These packets of energy emanating from some ratchet star cluster off in the Milky Way, from way back in their so-called “Summer of Love,” will prove to be enchanting despite their dubious origin. There are television dramas, radio dramas, and this crazy psychedelic music. The inhabitants go wild over that last. Sadly, there is a limited supply, and after a few years it degenerates into unlistenable wankery and disco, and soon everyone is well aware that the Byrds and the Strawberry Alarm Clock broke up, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators are nowhere to be found, and the Stones haven’t been the same since Brian Jones.
An enterprising xeno, sensing an opportunity to gain some leverage, or whatever the local equivalent of being rich would happen to be, feeds all those radio signals into a quasi-legal AI (hosted beyond the Oort cloud, or the fourth sun’s equivalent), and directs it to churn out some new stuff like that, but, you know. New. The AI delivers, in giant buckets. Lacking significant funding, our xeno decides to save on bandwidth and compress enough catalog to last a few years into about thirty audio files, each one unfolding into a full month’s worth of hits.
But business is risk, and risk is occasional failure, and for reasons too complicated (or mundane) to speculate on, the enterprise went under and the ownership of the data became contested, and long after the fad belonged to the judge’s distant ancestors, it was decided that this particular stretch of information should not exist, and was to be disposed of entirely by sending all known copies into informatic dissociation. This has for the most part eliminated the existence of these compositions from the universe, past, future, and present, except for this spooky quantum effect. Quantum effects are spooky no matter how much math we throw at them. In this case, every thirteen years, if you sit on the plinth of a forgotten statue to Wernher Von Braun in a neglected park in Huntsville, Alabama, you can hear the cicadas thrum with these lost sounds.
Which brings us to this new Sex Clark Five album. It’s really good!
Sex Clark Five: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex\_Clark\_Five
