Demand Full Automation

Simon Crab has a long history in music. He is anti-capitalist, a practicing anarchist and strongly against material acquisition. Many years ago, he offered the complete back catalogue by his former band Bourbonese Qualk as free downloads. Nevertheless, people like product, so the Qualk catalogue will be-reissued physically, and Klanggalerie are happy to release his second solo album on Compact Disc. Crab considers himself a non-musician, yet is oddly quite good at playing instruments like the guitar, clarinet, gamelan-percussion and especially electronics. In fact, his favourite musical instrument is the computer. Whereas classically trained musicians often assert that there is no artistry in computers, Crab asserts there is no artistry required to play a musical instrument well. Crab's 'music career' spans nearly four decades and continues until this very day. Demand Full Automation presents our society's choice of either liberating the working class through automation, or further subduing them with it. Enter this rich, and meticulously crafted mostly electro-acoustic narrative with some instrumental excursions, that emphasizes more synthetic than natural textures, and on occasion, a sublime melding of the two. Demand Full Automation continues the narrative; ambient-atmospherically pensive some moments, but mostly energetic and upbeat, and relentlessly marching towards progress. But what kind of progress? Says Crab "At the moment, the proletariat is being replaced by the precariat. It is a really interesting time, apart from all the kind of 'rise of fascism' and globalization. The big issue that nobody is looking at is automation and it seems to me that it can go one of either two ways; that can be the neo-liberal way in which corporates are going to use automation as a way of enriching themselves even further, irrespective of the workforce. The workforce is going to become completely irrelevant. That is the neo-liberal take on it which is a dystopian view of the world and it is clearly not going to end very well. The other view is that if you take more of a Marxist approach, taking control of the means of production, if the workers themselves control automation for the good of themselves, then there is a better future. Automation doesn't have to be a dystopian horror. It can easily be a liberating future." Track list: