29th August 2025
Christopher Nosnibor
When I was a child, I used to suffer anxiety – often when I was unable to sleep (my complex relationship with insomnia began at the age of five) – that my memories were stored in the vast eighteen-volume encyclopaedia my family owned, and I would be unable to access them because I couldn’t remember which volume they were stored in. Not that it was recognised as anxiety at the time: my parents would tell me to stop padding downstairs and bothering them, and to go to sleep. There’s a (sort of) valid reason for this (the anxiety, not the parental dismissal, but that’s an essay for another time): said encyclopaedia was made up from weekly magazines string-bound in identical hardback covers – a precursor to those infinite volume magazines devoted to knitting or whatever, or where you would build a Death Star in 300 instalments, that would likely cease publication before the collection was complete – and there were issues missing, including segments of the index, and topics were not arranged alphabetically like a conventional encyclopaedia. I couldn’t even find my favourite illustrations of dinosaurs fighting a lot of the time.
Things have only become more difficult since the advent of the Internet, and while spent my youth and even my early twenties in a pre-Internet world, there are many now who have never known anything else. Kids have existed online even pre-cognisance thanks to parents posting endless pics of them growing up on social media, and YouTube and Netflix have replaced conventional TV for anyone born in the last twenty years now.
Memory, identity, and their changing nature of both under the conditions of lives lived permanently online, are primary subjects of exploration for solo artist Will N, songwriter, performer, engineer, admin, and the man behind industrial / darkwave act Solid State Sunlight. These topics provided the focus of the ExoAnthro EP last year, and ‘Failsafe’ continues that trajectory, ‘address[ing] the realization that the more we develop our own identity, the less memory remains for experiencing life moving forward. Does it delete previous memory to make space for ongoing growth? What memories are disposable? What are the consequences if it fails?’
I hadn’t considered this, or the idea of what he refers to as ‘data-poisoning’ before, having come to view the mind as a recording device, which captured and archived every single experience, every thought, e very book read, movie seen, but stored them in such a way that it accessing those archives was often a random process – Random Access Memory in the most literal sense.
But we scroll, and we scroll, and we troll, and we troll, and personalities become fragmented, real-life and online personas and experiences partitioned off from one another. Who are you? As AI takes over, the lines are becoming increasingly blurred.
‘FailSafe’ is a gnarly, glitchy technoindustrial stomp through melting circuitry that collides Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails with Twitch-era Ministry, with crunching beats dominating jolting electronics and raspy vocals. The intro is a grating bass throb, emerging from an abstract crackle – and then the beat kicks in. And it kicks hard.
If the autotune / robotix breakdown in the middle sounds a shade retro or corny, it works in context, reminding us of how the visions of the future portrayed not so long ago have been replaced by a truly dystopian present. The future was exciting. Computers would make life easier, give us more leisure time and infinite knowledge: that was the promise. Now look where we are. The corporate takeover of the Internet was where it all started to sour, and it was inevitable, but still somehow came as a surprise.
With ‘FailSafe’, Solid State Sunlight draw together a host of references and points of discussion, directly or otherwise, through the savvy hybrid formulation of the composition. It’s hard, and it hits with some attack. This is the vibe of the late eighties and early nineties updated to poke the paranoia of the now. We live in troublesome – by which I mean hellish, fucked-up – times, and with ‘FailSafe’, Solid State Sunlight poke that nerve.
AA
Aural Aggravation 