Within the late 1690s, Scotland launched into what can be probably the most ambitious colonial schemes attempted within the seventeenth century. An try to colonise what’s now Panama in Central America, the Darien Scheme, because the project was named, was meant arrange trading posts between the Atlantic and Pacific. Nevertheless it was a disaster; the plan almost bankrupted Scotland and is a contributing factor to the country having to enter into union with England for the money. “After Brexit, I’ve been considering quite a lot of how that strategy of disintegration might proceed with Scottish independence,” says Kode9, also often called Hyperdub label head Steve Goodman.

The musician’s upcoming album Escapology – his first since 2015 – is the soundtrack to a wider sonic fiction project, Astro-Darien. It explores the break-up of Britain post-Brexit, and what that strategy of disintegration might seem like with Scottish independence, through a science-fiction lens. (Astro-Darien will likely be released through Flatlines, Hyperdub‘s audio essay imprint, in October.) Drawing parallels between futuristic space colonies in sci-fi and the history of colonialism, the 15-track album is a disorientating listen, reconfiguring Astro-Darien’s tense, alien atmospheres into high-definition, hyper-paced club rhythms.

“Astro-Darien is a weird 26-minute story narrated by Scottish robots with unsettling sound design, a fever dream of an AI geopolitics simulator,” explains Goodman. “I’m aware that this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea so I believed I’d do an instrumental, and more upbeat, rhythmic version that individuals might recognise more as a Kode9 release as a type of introduction to the world.”

For Goodman, sonic fiction allows us to assume possible worlds without limit. “Sonic fiction forces us to start out from the conjunction of what we hear and the imagination,” he says. “Conceiving a world sonically is quite a bit more open than one which has already been visualised.” As of late, it feels as if capitalism has swallowed any likelihood of a future, especially when the associated fee of living crisis and encroaching climate disaster point to the failures of a select few. But, in Goodman’s imagination, these power structures are turned on their head: “In Astro-Darien the elite stays on earth to rot while there’s a mass exodus of everyone else to the space habitat.”

Below, Goodman talks concerning the inspiration behind the Astro-Darien project and why he’s drawn to sci-fi in his work.

How would you describe the Astro-Darien universe that you just’ve created? How does it compare to the unique Darien enterprise?

Kode9: The unique enterprise was a failed attempt at colonialism that led to dependence. But after the founding of the UK, each Scotland and England continued, together, to colonise half the planet. So the Astro-Darien space habit reverses a few of these mistakes and crimes. For instance, the Astro-Darien universe is programmed by a Panamanian games designer. She codes it to specifically be xenophilic, to ally with outsiders and aliens, pay its historical debts etc. It’s also a type of inverse Elysium, the sci-fi film by Neill Blomkamp during which the elite of humanity migrates to an orbital ring world habitat. So in Astro-Darien the elite stays on earth to rot while there’s a mass exodus of everyone else to the space habitat.

Why did you select to zoom in on Darien and that specific moment in Scottish colonial history?

Kode9: It looks just like the break-up of the UK is inevitable in some unspecified time in the future in the long run, and I thought it was interesting to take a look at one among the aspects that result in the union within the first place, and the way, projected into the long run via science fiction, it might need a more interesting consequence that didn’t involve colonisation but relatively a rigorously constructed escape from the decaying trap of the British Empire.

Why did you select to separate the project into two parts? What’s their relationship to one another? What distinguishes the 2 other than one another?

Kode9: Well Astro-Darien is a weird 26-minute story narrated by Scottish robots with unsettling sound design, a fever dream of an AI geopolitics simulator. I’m aware that this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea so I believed I’d do an instrumental, and more upbeat, rhythmic version that individuals might recognise more as a Kode9 release as a type of introduction to the world.

“In Astro-Darien the elite stay on earth to rot while there’s a mass exodus of everyone else to the space habitat” – Kode9

What are among the most important inspirations behind the Escapology project?

Kode9: Consider Astro-Darien as a video game – imagine what Scottish video game company Rockstar North, who developed Grand Theft Auto, would do if, as an alternative of creating simulations of American street life, made a game concerning the break-up of Britain, post-Brexit and post-Scottish independence. I renamed them Trancestar North. I learned that there was actually a type of space race to construct rocket launch sites on the North coast and Shetland Islands so I type of extrapolated from that to assume a mass exodus from a disintegrating UK, but with a rather utopian dimension.

I had at all times had the Astro-Darien project in mind as an audio essay to come back out on Hyperdub’s sub-label Flatlines. The primary release on that label in 2019, was Mark Fisher; Justin Barton’s On Vanishing Land which focused on a walk along the south-east coast of England, whereas this project was partly inspired by a road trip along the North Coast of Scotland between lockdowns.

Well, the unique enterprise was a failed attempt at colonialism that led to dependence. But after the founding of the UK, each Scotland and England continued, together, to colonise half the planet. So the Astro-Darien space habit reverses a few of these mistakes and crimes.

How does it relate to your 2021 installation at Corsica?

Kode9: I originally was presupposed to perform/diffuse Astro-Darien in Paris in March 2020 on the acousmonium, a 50-speaker sound system built by musique concrete composer François Bayle in 1974. So what I used to be planning was pretty wild sonically. This got postponed by the pandemic which gave me time to go much deeper into the research process.

The Paris performance only happened in October 2021 and was sound only, diffused through the acousmonium in complete darkness. But earlier that yr in June, just as things were in limbo, and venues were semi-opening up again, Corsica Studios, which was allowed to open as a gallery space but not a club yet, asked me if I desired to do an installation. We had been turning their dance floor in Room 1 into an installation space since 2017 with the Ø events, so it was a cool opportunity to check out the sound designs I’d been composing but additionally to make it a three-screen audio-visual piece with video I had been filming on my road trip and collecting.

Are you able to describe the strategy of making the project? What was the research process like? Were there any particular texts or sources that stick out to you?

Kode9: I don’t normally have much time to play video games or go walking in nature, but during lockdown I spent a couple of weeks playing Hideo Kojima’s game Death Stranding which involved doing a lot of virtual mountain climbing. That inspired the road trip to the Scottish highlands in October 2020 to film the proposed sites of those spaceports.

I used to be reading a book called Space Settlements by Fred Sharmen. Within the Nineteen Seventies, NASA brought together architects, urban planners and artists to invest on the prospects of human life in outer space. I noticed that the phrase ‘space colony’ was used quite a bit and there’s a deep parallel between the history of colonialism and speculations about space colonisation in science fiction. But the actual project that stuck in my mind was the Stanford Torus and these drawings of orbital ring worlds with terraformed strips, often of urbanisation, lining the inside them.

There’s also a scene in Death’s End, the third volume of Cixin Liu’s 3 Body Problem sci-fi trilogy where the entire of humanity has been quarantined in Australia by the aliens. When it seems the Trisolarans are about to wipe everyone out, there’s a mad panic with rockets taking off in all places, everyone attempting to escape, and folks on the bottom getting torched by the boosters within the chaos. You may hear a little bit of this mad rocket panic on Escapology, except it’s people attempting to escape paranoid, post-Brexit, pandemic UK.

What role does sci-fi play within the project? How does it help to speak the ideas you’re attempting to convey?

Kode9: It’s a tool for reimagining the past and proliferating myths of potential futures.

“Sonic fiction forces us to start out from the conjunction of what we hear and the imagination. Conceiving a world sonically is quite a bit more open than one which has already been visualised“ – Kode9

Why is sonic fiction useful as a tool? What can it reveal concerning the present day?

Kode9: In film and video games, for instance, and for obvious reasons, what we see is given priority, with sound and music, it’s normally an after-thought. Sonic fiction forces us to start out from the conjunction of what we hear and the imagination. Conceiving a world sonically is quite a bit more open than one which has already been visualised.

Similarly, how can we use speculative futures to comment on the current?

Kode9: This weird, oblique universe I’m working with is de facto only a documentary, a rather twisted way of describing the current disintegration of the UK, of following those tendencies and attempting to imagine some higher outcomes.

How did your collaboration with Lawrence Lek begin? What do you are feeling his work brings to the project?

Kode9: Lawrence approached Hyperdub in early 2015, I believe, to see if we wanted any music videos. Around that point, I used to be ending off my last album Nothing. We got talking and I actually liked the way in which he was using simulation and game design software to reframe real locations and digitally transform them as eerie, surreal, depopulated digital worlds. We began talking concerning the concept for a depopulated, fully automated luxury hotel called the Notel that emerged out of the concept for the Nothing album.

I’ve at all times conceived of Astro-Darien as a video game (and Escapology as a game soundtrack), so I’ve had Lawrence’s work very much in mind because I’m less focused on the sport play as such than the digital world constructing. From very early on, I used to be talking to him about this project. I believe after I’d read the Space Settlements book I discussed before, and develop into focused on the speculative model of the Stanford Torus, I sent him some images of rotating, ring world type space habitats and a few images of the Old Man of Storr, a weird vertical rocky outcrop from the Isle of Skye that appeared right firstly of the film, Alien Prometheus.

The opposite visual references were landscapes from the sport Death Stranding and some design features of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Conceiving of those inconceivable worlds with Lawrence, it reminds you ways much video game reality is increasingly feeding back into our on a regular basis lives.

Escapology drops on July 15. Astro-Darien will likely be released on vinyl on Flatlines in October