Cyclical Simulacra by Itsu

Itsu’s 5th EP Cyclical Simulacra builds upon the speculative concepts laid down in his 2013 release Psychotria Digitalis, which explored concepts of digital transcendence and a recurrence of the stoned ape scenario within a simulated world. Cyclical Simulacra follows that speculative track millions of years into the future and deals with issues of post-human nature. This EP marks a move away from glitch hop and a return to earthy bass textures, natural, flowing beats, ethnic instrumentation and lush, melody driven sound design adventures.

Cyclical Simulacra; Digital Samsara.
In the mid 21st Century, humanity, or post-humanity as it should perhaps now be called, made the civilisation-wide decision to abandon physical reality and exist solely within a computer substrate. Not long after our transcendence to this new state of being, an anomaly began to appear in our virtual world; a plant, unknown by our simulation’s coders, began to appear seemingly out of nowhere. Psychotria Digitalis was the name we gave it, and just as our ape antecedents in the physical world had eaten the magic mushroom and accidentally kicked their own evolution into overdrive, we consumed this miraculous plant and triggered the next stage in human evolution; an evolution of consciousness. The ability to re-write the code of our own virtual existence. We became gods.

Omnipotence however, presented a problem. We faced no struggles, no challenges. There were no obstacles for us to overcome. We began to experience a kind of societal restlessness. The events that began unfolding in this new epoch mirrored our pre-upload human history, with events playing out like a facsimile of those that had occurred in the physical world millennia earlier. Somehow, in this utopian, post-scarcity world, we found a way to engineer conflict. Corruption. Crime. Poverty. War. These were things we should have outgrown, but even in this state of virtual nirvana, we continued to seek them out while simultaneously abhorring them. Is this lust for conflict an inescapable fact of (post-)human nature? For now, we exist in this Cyclical Simulacra, endlessly repeating the cycle of creating then destroying our own utopia.

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