Cosmo Dance – Cosmo-Logic

The present can hardly save itself from virtualisation and simulation. When watching moving images or listening to music, one sometimes wonders whether it might have been generated exclusively by the processing power of an AI. Alongside this machine-made virtualisation, however, there is also human-made virtualisation, if you like. And that began long before software developers started using the power of mainframe systems for LLM programmes.

Look, for instance, at the cover of Cosmo Dance’s EP Cosmo-Logic, from Naples, and you might think you were holding a record from the 1980s. Listen to its four tracks, and there is a good chance that impression will remain. A straight beat, a slap bass, the occasional distorted, reverberant guitar tone as an accent, plus an altered female voice chanting something unintelligible on »Força Major«. Synthesisers, too, of course, though used sparingly. Producer Cosimo Mandorino, who is behind the name Cosmo Dance, makes his own sense of Italo disco and electro – on »My Machine«, for instance – but from a present-day perspective. He does so, however, with such a sense of tradition that the temporal difference is barely noticeable. With a title like »Binary War«, one might briefly wonder whether this was already quite so explicit a theme some 40 years ago. But with a bassline modelled on Donna Summer’s »I Feel Love«, such brooding soon disappears again. An almost perfect simulation.