From the cold dusts of Pluto’s (and Jupiter’s) icy dessert sands rises a certain apparition- the apparition of the repressed otherness of humanity’s long forgotten past, it’s folious attempt at playing the dangerous game of discovering the fundamental fabric of existential planetary unknowingness and openness. In this sense, the name of the self- titled debut of Slovenian industrial/’’cyberpunk’’ musical project of Homo Plasticus is rather deceptive. It is by no means a simple representation of a certain impasse, that the pompous titles of the so-called ‘’post-industrial’’, ‘’postmodern’’ ages seems to point towards to and at the same time, completely ridicule, but rather an acceleration of their ambiguousness and folly. The figure of Homo Plasticus is the figure of a 21^st century man, entrenched into a world of mechanistic and neon-lighted pleasures, where the excess of technological hyper-realization and gloomy urban lifestyle meet in a disjunct worldly crossing.  The only way in which they come together is through a basic thread of unease that permeates the structuredness of man’s placement into his universal fact of being, trivializing his sacredness. What Homo Plasticus as a conglomerate of different virtual endeavours, influenced by the likes of industrial and goth giants such as Skinny Puppy, Nachtmahr, DAF etc. and important intellectual thought-masters entails to do, is make this fact of being clear, to show it’s coursing through the electrical pulsations of modern-age, underground cyberpunk imaginarium, even nihilistic pretensions the search for it brings on about and the consequences it simultaneously hides. We needn’t to undertake this task of ‘’enlightening’’ our existential position through a hateful spite towards evolutionistic, anarchistic processes of today’s macro-cosmic merging of man and machine. We also needn’t to search for its origins billions of light years away, where it all started in a quick glimpse of a millisecond, a fiery primordial flash. We can simply begin in the embrace of strangeness of our solar system  in the ‘’The’’ of ‘’The Planetery’’ of ‘’The Earthly’’, ‘’The Non-Planetary’’ (asteroidly??) of Pluto, where mindful questioning meets at once with the sonic of attacks of Homo Plasticus’ booming industro-beats.

The Project’s self-titled effort is thus a near 30-minute adventure through soundscapes of our neglected cosmic background. It is thus not a simple journey to heaven and back to hell, but rather a hellish experience of a saintly ordo ab chao, be it in the form of  the track Jupiter’s ‘’housey’’ calibrations and alienating spaceisms or Carl Sagan’s profoundly random dialecticisms, where the line between great minds and ‘’autists’’ disappears in favor of a ‘’great autism of the Heideggarians, Carl Saganians  and the Jason Genovians’’. What stands out, However, is Homo Plasticus’ eclectic attitude- the inconsistent pleasure of incorporating the influences of video game and trap music sonorities into their otherwise industrially shaped repertoire. This is especially evident in the second half of the titular release, where even EDM led characteristics merge with heavy laden and pompous trap beats in the songs such as Hi-Nrg, Gone and Sad boi. Such fragmentary approaches make up for their subjectivism and uniqueness, however unfinished their intentions seem to be. The final product is thus a delightful treat for the hearing needs of electro-punk and video game nerds alike, albeit in a hostile manner to those preferring coherent structuring and senseful music making. It is, in the last instance, an existential experience of the hyperactive, everyday trivial yawn.

Photo: Peter Mišic
Model: Sara Lunka
Original Art: Luka Vodlan
Editing: Dan Oblak

Text: Homo Plasticus