PREMIERE Human Potential, "The Sightseer"
Andrew Becker of Human Potential emerging from out of the ether; photographed by Daniel Roland Tierney.
In the ancient days of cave dwellers we imagine our early earthen forbears peering out at the vast, largely undisturbed wilderness from the vantage point perch of a towering mountaintop. A time when anything and everything was abstract and opaque in its existence, origin, scientific understanding, social dynamics, behavioral patterns, convection cycles, planetary shifts, and so forth. Humankind from the beginning has been on a quest for knowledge, an infinite impetus to gain a view into the privy innerworkings of society and the inner operational mechanics of the world itself.
The advent of documenting these findings lead to insights being etched upon the walls of caves, marked across the papyrus of scrolls, to stored in the archives of Alexandria, later connected by networks in an internet superhighway, leading to entire systems, entities, dubious actors, and more to create infrastructure obsessed with collecting the data and metrics of humanity seen and scanned by bots and machine learning platforms, under the auspices of suspect startups, and other curious companies.
Artist/auteur Andrew Becker ponders how contemporary corporatization of surveillance has set us back to the dark ages on the new Human Potential track “The Sightseer”. Featured off the upcoming Eel Sparkles album for What Delicate Records, Andrew surveys the infinite inquisition of collecting insights on an unlimited array of phenomena that serves as the systemic engine’s unquenchable thirst for endless and absolute observations. An album steeped in the lore of an ill-fated trip to Inner Mongolia in the search of the iconic baritone Ariunbataar Ganbaatar before being held captive by the progeny of Larry Drake and being forced to watch the 1992 film Dr. Giggles ad nauseum. Performing improvised scores for the film, Becker and others would later be liberated by survivors of the Greenpeace Warrior incident and upon returning to LA the artist would channel new concepts and constructs into what would become the new album. The latest chapter of Human Potential observes how the present informs the past, the past informs the present, entertaining the spinning hamster wheel of progress' arrested development held in the holding pattern by the hands of the technocratic broligarchy.
"The Sightseer" scans the lay of the land for signs of intelligent and unintelligent life (and everything in between). Human Potential absorbs all there has ever been, all that ever was, and all that ever will be like a vacuum ingesting all the particles of matter that make up the civilizations that construct the all but forgotten worlds and lost wonders that comprise the mythic fodder reserved for the textbooks of upper academia. Becker observes how the eyes of primordial perception evolve into the nebulous ghosts that haunt the digitized metrics and mechanisms that pilfer and profit from the sensitive input/output offered by the unsuspecting populous.
Andrew orchestrates a sound that spins and spans across the terrains of time itself. The artist conjures up notions of Enoch-esque characters, from old world tractates to the tech titans of a our modern world that is absolutely imbued and obsessed with the wholesale buying and selling of privy intel of anyone and everyone that has ever existed (living or deceased). "The Sightseer" brings big data back to it's principle basics with big thumping basslines, urgent harmonic vocals, and a mix that instills a rhythmic collection of components that causes the audience to listen, stand up and take notice. Human Potential paints our humanity as a wayward collective that ultimately is returned to its most basic form by way of the hubris of trying to know everybody's business about everything. The skyscraper headquarters here are returned back to the meager cave dwellings.
Andrew Becker shared the following visions of “The Sightseer”:
This song imagines a Michael Bay production of a film that poses the heretofore unconceived, never answered and potentially inconsequential question, What if Paul Bowles had Instagram? Without getting too fastuous, the conceit loosely correlates to a Marshall McLuhan quote I read some time ago:
‘One of the many flips of our time is that the electric information environment returns man to the condition of the most primitive prober and hunter. Privacy invasion is now one of our biggest knowledge industries.’
Human Potential's album Eel Sparkles will be available March 6 via What Delicate Records.
