MILE ME DEAFs new album is a swan song for the human race. In his previous albums, mastermind Wolfgang M?stl has hinted at his penchant for dystopic fictions that he links to the fragile status-quo of the current state of affairs. With ALIEN AGE, however, he has abondoned the fuzz-and-thrash sound of his previous albums. Sampled beats and loops set the stage for his new album, reducing the 90s indie rock sound of past records to homeopathic doses. This time, dub, vaporwave, jazz and ambient come in the foreground. The entire album was single-handedly produced by M?stl, who used a vintage Akai sampler to lay down the base tracks in classic old school hip-hop fashion. M?stl created an album full of idiosyncratic and unconventional MILE ME DEAF pop songs drawing from a variety of sources: from thrift store bin records, to recordings of friends bands, to audio curiosities from all over the world. For the first time on a MMD song, M?stl has handed over the microphone to Sex Jams band mate Katarina Trenk, who sings lead vocals on the hypnotic dance track Shibuya+. ALIEN AGE offers a tongue-in-cheek infatuation with extraterrestrial visitations, human extinction, and all manners of bizarreness from the depths of the internet. Its an exercise in encapsulating the weird vibe of the modern age. Between the lines, the album can be interpreted as a posthumanism record. Its the inconsistencies of the world that leave M?stl to doubt the role of man as the spearhead of the social hierarchy—he throws into question —the traditional thought that the (western) mans reasoning trumps all else. The idea for the cover arose out of a collaboration with Burnbjorn, who was also responsible for the previous album design, and plays upon the ‘stereogram principle, whereupon closer inspection the images take on a 3-D effect. A tangled pattern visible at first glance suddenly achieves another dimension when viewed in a certain way.
