FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Canada's Best Noise Punk Band Explains Why the Future Is Cyberpunk Hell

The Soupcans' frontman explains their DIY take on Cronenberg in their new video, “Crimes of the Future, Part II.”

The Toronto-based noise punk band the Soupcans wield sludgy, gloriously abrasive walls of distortion like a meat axe, and their vision of the future is every bit as visceral as their music.

The Soupcans’ new video for “Crimes of the Future, Part II” from 2013’s Parasite Brain EP features a cyberpunk robot with a sociopathic human consciousness slaughtering leather-wearing punks and stealing their booze. The video’s a DIY vision of cyber-hell that takes its name from David Cronenberg’s 1970 sci-fi horror classic, Crimes of the Future.

Advertisement

It’s equal parts Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Short Circuit, and it combines fucked up robo-violence with a Kurzweilian bent to reflect anxieties about our artificial future with low-budget glee.

“My boss is a computer. I take orders from a computer and I drive around all day looking for communications cables. That’s fairly alienating in a sense,” Soupcans frontman Dave Evans told me in a phone call from his work van. “They’re the very same wires that make this whole futuristic world possible. I hate this job. I hate these wires. I guess I’m a prisoner; I’m bound by these wires.”

Like most science fiction, “Crimes of the Future, Part II” aims to lay a critique against the present as well as look to the future. In the networked world, we’re saturated with tweets and status updates and yet every day we’re surrounded by people who we don't know and likely never will. It can be confusing and, to borrow from Evans, even alienating.

“I had a very rich pre-internet existence, and now I’m in this shit. Is it hellish? It’s hard to say. Doesn’t it just kind of feel… Well, I dunno, it kind of feels confusing,” Evans said.

Information and data are circulating online faster than ever before, and in Toronto, the physical infrastructure of the city is changing just as quickly. The markers of the old city, especially in Little Portugal, where Evans lives, are being torn down to make way for condos and skyscrapers. Running headlong into the future can be disorienting, he told me.

“Crimes of the Future, Part II” is a cautionary tale about technological progress and what is lost in its name. “As we go deeper into this future world, it’s not so clear cut what it means to be flesh and blood anymore,” Evans said. “Are you familiar with the concept of ego death? When you kill your ego and you’re reduced to your wants and needs? A robot with a dead ego; maybe that’s where all these wires are leading us,” Evans philosophized. “It’s going to strangle our egos to death, and maybe that’s not a bad thing—I can’t say if its right or wrong, I’m just living in it.”

Whether you’re a pessimist, an optimist, or a what-the-fuck-is-going-on-ist about the future, cranking The Soupcans’ apocalyptic punk in your ears (while they're still human) is a fitting way to ride it out.