{"title":"Discovery Zone","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"quantum-web","title":"Quantum Web","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eQuantum Web\u003c\/i\u003e is the new album from Discovery Zone, the experimental pop project of New York born, Berlin based musician and multi-media artist JJ Weihl. After the slow-building but undeniable fervor around Remote Control, Discovery Zone’s debut album, \u003ci\u003eQuantum Web\u003c\/i\u003e quite literally picks up where JJ left off. In what she considers an ongoing, process oriented continuum, \u003ci\u003eQuantum Web\u003c\/i\u003e is the next evolutionary phase of Discovery Zone– arranging the past, present, and future across the infinite, invisible web that interconnects us all.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMoving to Berlin from her native New York City in the early 2010s, the songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist developed her musical practice over four albums as a member of the beloved art rock band Fenster before introducing Discovery Zone with Remote Control in 2020. JJ named Discovery Zone after the chain of indoor, youth oriented entertainment facilities filled with mazes and climbing structures that shuttered shortly after the turn of the millennium — a space born of commercialism that she describes as a “glorified cage” which nonetheless offered her, and millions of other children, the freedom to explore. The music of Discovery Zone plays with a perception of inevitable corporate societal control, but finds its own power and liberation in sounds that obscure their institutional sources.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eInspired by the omnipresence of advertising and corporate culture as much as the potential of cybernetics and neural networks, Discovery Zone plunges into an uncanny valley with \u003ci\u003eQuantum Web\u003c\/i\u003e, where the distinctions between the earnest and the ironic blur in tandem with the border between the human and the post-human. JJ wrote a number of \u003ci\u003eQuantum Web’s\u003c\/i\u003e songs for Cybernetica, a multimedia performance she was commissioned in 2021. Cataloging her daily activities as data points to be analyzed, she broke her life down into statistics and presented them onstage to a live audience, depersonalizing her experience while claiming it for herself in all its mundane yet intimate detail. \u003ci\u003eQuantum Web\u003c\/i\u003e casts JJ in a concordant role: a pop star mediated by machines, just as willing to sink anonymously into her productions as she is to shine as their legible central figure.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOn \u003ci\u003eQuantum Web\u003c\/i\u003e, Discovery Zone explores a widescreen pop sound speckled with luminous vocal performances and baroque instrumental flourishes. While JJ’s voice is focal and transfixing at the center of the composition, she contrasts moments of clarity with strategies of obfuscation through hi-definition synthesis and time-dilating ambience. Vocoded textures layer into dense choral networks. A.I. text-to-speech abruptly hits the mix like a loudspeaker announcement over a meditation session. Staccato samples of JJ’s disembodied voice pepper the arrangements, creating their own pointillist harmonic systems that play a role closer to synth patch than vocal take. \u003ci\u003eQuantum Web\u003c\/i\u003e draws power from this composite mosaic of inputs, as if to propose that all these forms still represent JJ’s core self no matter how far they might splinter from the sounds that came from her physical form.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThough delivered in the crisp fidelity of contemporary radio-ready pop, the production signifiers we encounter on \u003ci\u003eQuantum Web\u003c\/i\u003e seem more like they should reach us bearing the grain and warble of a VHS tape. Working with producer E.T., JJ dips into a pool of decades-spanning style, finding room for 80s sophisti-pop, modern hyper-digital bubblegum, and early electro. Flights of motorik momentum animate more bustling compositions while shades of downtempo and city pop dim the lights over more subdued moments. An otherwise electronic arrangement might suddenly host a crystalline guitar riff or a bumping electric bassline, calling back to JJ’s musical upbringing playing guitar and bass as\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ea teen on through her decade spent in a more traditional “rock band” setting. Interspersed among the pieces of \u003ci\u003eQuantum Web\u003c\/i\u003e that code as some permutation of electronic pop songwriting, a series of minute-long interludes turns the dial toward lush textural sculpting and pure ambient drift — regularly scheduled programming punctuated by commercial breaks.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Quantum Web is our web of personal connections, the world wide web, the web of lies we tell each other. It’s a trap, a figurative hologram that we see all around us, but one we participate in of our own free will. We acknowledge that to escape would be impossible. But we still find a simple joy, or at least the thrill of confronting prosaic ineffability, when we log back on, when we play a trivia game on a little screen attached to the backseat of a cab, when we walk through the mall and look up through the infinite ceiling or the sky.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDiscovery Zone’s \u003ci\u003eQuantum Web\u003c\/i\u003e will be released in LP, Japanese import CD, and digital editions. A portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit Doctors Without Borders, who provide independent, impartial medical humanitarian assistance to people affected by conflict, disease outbreaks, natural and human- made disasters, and exclusion from health care in more than seventy countries.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rvng","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50384018571595,"sku":"2170155","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Quantum_Web_c650802c_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726283189"},{"product_id":"remote-control","title":"Remote Control","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"UTF-8\"\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003eRemote Control\u003c\/em\u003e is the debut album from New York-born and based artist JJ Weihl, originally released in 2020 and reissued five years on. Built of drum machines, vocoder, sound collage, theremin, and electric guitar,\u003cem\u003e Remote Control\u003c\/em\u003e reconfigures the language of mass-produced electronics into a form of cybernetic pop.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eRather than chase glossy innovation, Weihl reshapes the keyboard preset and drum machine default into something equally nostalgic and synthetic, accessible and experimental. A meditation on our contradictory moment in history, the album reflects on identity, perception, and mediation through sound and image.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eLive visuals and music videos extend this inquiry, weaving together green screen, YouTube ephemera, vacation footage, and 3D renderings. Adorned with a holographic key, Remote Control plays with the idea of what it means to be real—both a surface and the space it seems to contain.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rvng Intl","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":53128740143435,"sku":"R8539-6023","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/2000x2000bb_026efa4e-b8fc-4ccb-90da-7c44156e9f49.jpg?v=1754550119"},{"product_id":"library-copy-do-not-remove","title":"Library Copy Do Not Remove","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn \u003cem\u003eLibrary Copy Do Not Remove\u003c\/em\u003e, Discovery Zone’s JJ Weihl presents a digital enchantment of reality, braiding together the material and non-material to reveal that they are, in fact, two aspects of one and the same thing. In Weihl’s world, Nature and technology are not enemies, but instead create each other in an infinite dance of meaning and reflection. Originally created in spatial sound for the Zeiss- Groß Planetarium in Berlin, \u003cem\u003eLibrary Copy Do Not Remove\u003c\/em\u003e is a creation mythology for the simulated universe. However, this is not some dry, Bostromian, masculine fantasy of a digital reality devoid of nature’s mysteries. Instead, Weihl insists that the listener allow space for the awesome reality of the natural world within the framework of a simulation. If our world is simulated, then the simulation has to be capable of creating the beauty and splendor of Nature. In this way, Weihl engages an ambient alchemy, calling for a grand reconciliation of Nature and the technological, while asking us to consider how and where the experience of transcendent human consciousness might exist between them. Written while Weihl was simultaneously completing her sophomore album Quantum Web, the songs on Library Copy Do Not Remove reflect an expansive, inspirational state of both excitement and anxiety at the task of composing music for such a unique space. The songs themselves were shaped through Ambisonics, a specific format of spatial audio that is directional instead of being channel-based (like stereo), and were transmitted through a mosaic of 49 speakers. Because it was written for live performance, Library Copy Do Not Remove was never conceived as an album per se, but instead as a three-dimensional event. In this way the sonic staging mirrored how we perceive sound in our everyday lives: surrounding us from all directions. For this album release, Weihl mixed all of the songs again from the ground up with long time producer E\/T, reimagining and reworking the constellation of tracks for a stereo experience. Inspired by the work of James Gleick, LD Deutsch, Johannes Kepler and Jorges Luis Borges, Library Copy Do Not Remove explores the creative tension between reality and perception, information and mythology, harmony and disorder. Throughout the album, Weihl asks how we as humans come to understand the universe around us and the underlying code which animates it. What emerges is a sonic mythos that tells of spiraling digital universes, each nested within each other, in which every participatory agent is both a part, and the whole, of reality, at once. In this way, Library Copy Do Not Remove is a cyber- expression of perennial wisdom: instead of “as above, so below,” Weihl might suggest, “as with input, so with output.” Each track on Library Copy Do Not Remove reflects the larger themes in question. An audio representation of the Big Bang created by a physics professor is run through a vocoder, translating an astronomical origin story into a digital cosmogony: A universe born in a dial-up tone. Infinite libraries are conjured and reinforced by true mirrors and cosmic projections. Oceans of data create looped architectures that blur the line between the posthuman and the divine. Human consciousness reaches its upper limits, and then ascends even further. A tapestry of nature sounds is woven into an electronic field, infusing an aspect of intelligent hope back into the digital. A middle way opens up: natural, spiritual, technological. All songs on the album were written by Weihl, and co-written and c0produced by Lucas Chantre. Timo Bittner, who designed and installed the spatial audio sound system at the Zeiss-Groß Planetarium, and his colleague Andrew Rahman, provided Weihl with tutorials and support on how to compose for the unique sound system, guiding her through the process of composing with Ambisonics. Bittner and Rahman arranged the material for live interpretation, while Rahman mixed the album in spatial audio for the 2023 performance, and for wider release in Dolby Atmos. . Library Copy Do Not Remove tells an ancient secret in futuristic language: our perception of reality is the very thing that shapes it. Weihl reminds us that any understanding of Nature as a simulation must invert upon itself to recognize that even a simulated universe is contained within a larger Nature. And in much the same way, Weihl discloses that we too are catalogued, symbiotically, within a larger reality. Like copies within a library, mutually dependent on each other for our very existence.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rvng Intl","offers":[{"title":"LP - Night Sky Marble","offer_id":56974184022347,"sku":"R1928-8614","price":26.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":56998228001099,"sku":"R1928-9389","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/CargoRecords_242115711252949_6513644332314265599_DiscoveryZone-LibraryCopy.png?v=1775574574"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/fr\/collections\/discovery-zone.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}