Flatline

2025

"Dixie?"
"Yeah."
"You ever try to crack an AI?"
"Sure. I flatlined."
— Case and Dixie in 'Neuromancer'

Flatline is a jungle and techstep mix inspired by multiple things that caught my attention last year.

tracklist:

Crypticz - The Guided
Maya Soundscape - Mioisis [Restored*]
Coco Bryce - Deep into the Jungle
Earl Gray & Dead Man's Chest - Fugitive Version
Dom & Roland - Hydrolicks
Swift - Decoy [Restored*]
Undercover Project - Code 4
??? - Untitled B
Makai - The Damaja [Restored*]
Ono Sendai - Codebreaker
Hijacker - Agera [Restored*]
Ed Rush & Nico - Torque
Ed Rush & Nico - Mothership
Solar Nine - See How It Sounds [Restored*]
Decoder - Elements (Technical Itch Remix)
Ed Rush & Nico - Proton

*Some of the songs in the mix were only available on YouTube, and since I couldn't buy the original records, I used Apollo, a band-sequence modeling for high-quality audio restoration. This tool allowed me to restore the audio and create high-resolution versions.

world memory archive

The internet and the world wide web are the ultimate human archive combo—at least while DNA data storage or any other type of genetic memories become a thing. I'm really glad to live in a time when we can explore this archive freely (though not everywhere, unfortunately) and harness it as a creative force.

Last year I became obsessed with techstep, a drum and bass subgenre that was born around 1996 and 1997. The reason of my obsession? I was also born in 1997. And what a better way to indulge a niche music fixation than by diving into a long YouTube archive playlist full of hidden gems and forgotten dubs?

I listened to almost 700 songs from around the time techstep was the thing, searching for the tracks I liked the most while learning about the genre and the artists who nurtured it, and ultimately, try to compose a DJ set.

Finally, going deeper into the '97 vibe, I discovered that Winamp was also born that year. I remember so much trying out different skins and playing with the music visualization plugin. Without the web, finding Winamp web implementations or emulators would have been nearly impossible. But I found Webamp, the latest and most active right now. The player you see on this page is a Webamp instance, playing the set I recorded.

Some hotkeys (clicking the video window):

space: next viz
backspace: previous viz
scroll Lock / F14: toggle preset cycling

memory reconstructions

Computers, like other media, are metaphor machines: they both depend on and perpetuate metaphors.

— Wendy Chun on 'Programmed Visions: Software and Memory'

Computer memory is a metaphor I found very interesting. First, because it reveals us that the figure of memory is not simple static storage—it’s dynamic and complex as I describe in the next section. Second, it demostrates how information can be preserved across countless different mediums: DNA, neurons, paper, grooves on different kinds of surfaces, an array of electrons... This portability and interoperability—with it's gains and looses depending on the medium—fascinates me.

For the music in this mix, the information was stored mainly as:

An arrangement of electrons in the memory of musicians' computers.
Grooves etched into polyvinyl chloride and polycarbonate records.
An arrangement of electrons in the memory of Google’s global data centers.

read-only memories:

"...I was crazy. Figured I'd try to cut it. Hit the first strata and that's all she wrote. My joeboy smelled the skin frying and pulled the trodes off me. Mean shit, that ICE."

"And your EEG was flat."

"Well, that's the stuff of legend, ain't it?"

Case jacked out. "Shit," he said, "how do you think Dixie got himself flatlined, huh? Trying to buzz an AI. Great..."

Dixie Flatline is my favorite character from William Gibson's Neuromancer. Two aspects from his construct really intrigue me.

He is a contained entity made exclusively of memories, yet he is unable to change or evolve. Thinking about Dixie reminds me how we often overlook that memory is not a read-only act. Au contraire, it has a very active nature: we rewrite memories throughout our lives, we play with them, they come and go, and they can be cherished or despised. (Elizabeth Swanstrom explores the Dixie character and the architecture of memory brilliantly in her article Wax Blocks, Data Banks, and File #0467839: The Archive of Memory in William Gibson’s Science Fiction).
His nickname Flatline is the result of his encounter with an AI's ICE. His recollection of the event always gives me a strange mix of exciting and terrifying vibes. He nearly died at the hands of a powerful digital entity, yet he seemed eager to try and hack it, despite the danger. This whole thing makes me wonder about how terror and ecstasy are deeply related.

This last point also resonates with my own encounter with drum and bass. From the start, it was a music genre that struck me down. But even if it flatlined me, I feel I'd never lose my desire to cut it, to hack it, to learn more about it.