Before They Were Gone by netbooks.WRLD

For fans of Death’s Dynamic Shroud, Maria & The Mirrors, Lydia Roberts, the ascendent vapornoise scene, and whatever the opposite of a Marvel movie script would be, Before They Were Gone by netbooks.WRLD sets a soundtrack to the action in our lives devoid of the linear grandiosity which typically motivates us to call music “cinematic.” Instead, the environments of netbooks.WRLD assault us with all the randomness of the internet, splicing a diverse array of samples into an underlying aesthetic of noisy digital chaos. Unpredictable and uncomfortable aesthetics still find ways to dance in jagged circles, repetitive to the point of entrapping us but nevertheless too disorienting to inspire comfort. Within this record’s labyrinth of instrumental storytelling, the ghosts of prior cultural optimism haunt us at every turn, with random cultural references mutilated and muffled to a point beyond parody, a point which inspires nothing but pity for these admittedly contemptuous pieces of past consumerist drivel. We were put to work constructing the maze, we were imprisoned in the maze, and now we run with no hope of exit.