Even before “hyperreality” is explicitly invoked in “Heart-Shaped Reality,” Baudrillard was already brought to mind by the overloaded maxi-collages of The End. Here is a grotesque, ouroboric cultural semiotics, a festering mass of neon signs abstracted to such a degree that they both consume and signify only themselves; Burroughs’ cut-up polemic also lurks behind the scenes, but there are no accidental premonitions or moments of serendipitous sublimity to be found, only the death spiral of the modern era to which we are already subjected each and every day. Though venerable multimedia project I Cut People doesn’t exactly deal in obscurities when it comes to source material—within the first ten or so minutes you’ll hear, among other things, such deep cuts as “Yeah,” “Everybody Hurts,” “Sexy and I Know It,” “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and “Gangnam Style”—and yet the double whammy of pseudo-narrative splicing and abstract textural play is anything but passé. “Thirty Percent” is an especially harrowing cut that directly engages with the recent escalation of the Palestinian genocide; “HypeRealove” maps the horrors of consumer AI. This is dense, mile-a-minute, often truly disturbing stuff, but it’s usually funny, in a ruthless and absurd and desperate kind of way (see “The End”). There are also times when it is genuinely pretty: the coda of “Out of Existence” with Buttress O’Kneel pairs the Scientist’s monologue in Bad Boy Bubby with the strums of The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” and “calc( hurt x 2 )” delivers a haunting and somehow tender threnody for the extinction event just witnessed (experienced). “People: they tend to collapse in on themselves.”
Noise Not Music 