u/ZN86

Bandcamp: https://quadratox.bandcamp.com/album/plexus Free Bandcamp Download Codes: https://dlcm.app/quadratox/plexus Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/1sQtKByQcTvcSbyigrYeXy

Hi everyone,

I’ve always been fascinated by the version of the future we were promised around the late 90s and early 2000s.

That era had a strange energy: chrome surfaces, translucent plastics, futuristic fonts, primitive digital interfaces, cyber optimism, weird malls, early internet dreams, music that sounded like tomorrow, and technology that still felt mysterious. It was messy, hopeful, playful, and human.

But when I look back now, it also feels haunted.

A lot of those dreams evolved into something colder than expected: surveillance, social media addiction, algorithmic sameness, anxiety, disposable culture, permanent distraction. The bright Y2K future didn’t disappear, it mutated.

That contrast has obsessed me for years.

I recently spent 3 years creating an experimental album called Plexus, built around exactly that feeling: Y2K meets dystopia.

The concept was imagining a forgotten branch of the future where obsolete technology decays into nature. Broken devices become instruments. Glitches become rhythm. Empty urban spaces are slowly reclaimed by plants. Old interfaces become spiritual artifacts.

The sound design used a lot of strange methods:

• Old Nokia phone tones • Degraded bitrates • Alarm clock radio interference • Field recordings • Primitive synth textures • Broken digital artifacts

I wanted it to feel like finding an abandoned shopping mall terminal still glowing in the rain while vines grow through it.

To me, Y2K was the last time technology still felt like wonder.

Did anyone else feel this contradiction? That Y2K was both the most optimistic future… and the beginning of the one we’re trapped in now?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Hi everyone, I’ve just released Plexus, an 85-minute experimental album I spent a long time building in near-total isolation, both physically and creatively. I wanted to share it here because I think people in this community might appreciate the process behind it as much as the music itself. The core idea was to create a world that felt like Y2K technology colliding with nature, memory, and dystopia. Something like a lost future. A digital civilization decaying slowly while plants grow through it. I gave myself a rule during production: minimal setup, maximum imagination. I wanted to see how far I could go without relying on expensive tools, presets, trends, or obvious references. No chasing algorithms, no trying to sound current, no copying scenes. Just a very clear atmosphere in my head that I tried to translate into sound. Some examples:

The very first sound on the album (opening track) is a contact lens played like people sometimes play a blade of grass between their fingers and blow through it. It created a strange distant whistle, almost like a flute.

I made glitch percussion by scraping the antenna of a 90s alarm clock radio against a jack cable while recording into my interface.

I used the Nokia 3310 ringtone composer as a melodic source.

One track includes rain I recorded while in Aokigahara.

Another was intentionally mastered through a PlayStation 2 with reduced bitrate for a harsher early-digital texture.

Sea sounds on the closing track were not field recordings, but synthesized on a Behringer Model 15.

A piece called Platform 16 was timed to match the length of a real train platform in Florence. If you walk it at the BPM of the track, you reach the end as the song finishes.

Emotionally, the album came from a mix of fascination and grief. I’ve always been obsessed with the promise of the late 90s / early 2000s future: strange interfaces, primitive digital optimism, ugly-beautiful hardware, weird public spaces, emerging internet culture. It felt like humanity was heading somewhere bizarre but alive. Instead, a lot of that became surveillance, addiction, sterile platforms, anxiety, and flattened culture. So Plexus became my attempt to imagine another branch of that timeline:A technoprimitivist Y2K ecosystem where broken machines become instruments, glitches become rhythm, and obsolete technology gets reclaimed by organic life. It’s not an album made for singles or quick consumption. It was made to be heard front-to-back, with headphones or in a place where you can actually disappear into it for a while. If any of this sounds interesting, I’d genuinely love to know what you think. Thanks for reading.

Free Bandcamp Download Codes: https://dlcm.app/quadratox/plexus Bandcamp: https://quadratox.bandcamp.com/album/plexus Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/1sQtKByQcTvcSbyigrYeXy