12,000 Seconds - Eight Track Tape

Hacker Farm are a collection of musicians / makers / artists / refusniks based in South Somerset. Sometimes they're a band; sometimes they're... something else. They never quite go where you expect them to, and – in an age of heritage-labels and electronic-music-by-numbers – that's a good thing. Their second album UHF raised their profile, along with pieces in Wire and the Guardian, but since then they've ploughed their own furrow, each mini-release mining different tones, textures and themes, but all built using carboot hardware, redundant tech and borrowed time. Visionary cracked aesthetics, innit.

As part of their 12000 Seconds series of releases, the Magic & Dreams label invited a handful of sympathetic artists to create eight pieces of music that were each a set, specific length of time. Hacker Farm responded to the challenge by making a virtue of using these exact lengths. The duration dictated the content, kinda. Sometimes it's good to be hemmed in.

Eight-Track Tape is the name of HF's side of a split 12000 Seconds cassette release on which they were twinned with musician, film-maker and fellow-traveller Hogge, from the Cube cinema / arts-space in Bristol. It's exactly the same as / completely different to all the Hacker Farm releases that came before it. If you dug them, you'll dig this. If you didn't, then this won't convince you.

So, what's it sound like? Some snapshots, sound-bites and impressionistic promo-bollocks:

"Lost Cosmonauts" and "Chelyabinsk-65" are the sound of abandoned space-stations and secret Soviet factory-cities. Poisoned landscapes and rotting space-suits. Rust and high roentgen-counts. Cultural blight. What comes after expansionism, empire and implosion? When did the Future end?

"Fukkit" is a burst of cracked noise and internalised Cloud Rage, Britain at the end of its tether; Joe Public trying to kick back against something intangible and post-physical, something that won't let you kick it. One call-centre menu or twelve-hour shift too many. Your car broke down, there's no wi-fi. Who do you shout at or blame – who do you punch – when there's no one on the other end of the line?

"The Disappeared" is a hymn to Loss. Music for the dispossessed, for everyone who went away, who went missing or was taken from us.

A minute or two into "Sprachmaschine SA", corporate machine-era intelligences swivel their cold camera-eyes and bring them to bear on the listener, creating a slow-growing sense of unease – a music that listens back. Unsettling and inhuman, the opposite of the clean, functional and optimistically benign retro-world imagined by Kraftwerk. SIRI turns evil.

On Eight-Track Tape, Hacker Farm combine visions of a fractured, barely recognisable past, a broken present and an uncertain future. One where you are your own content.

This is not a press release.