Human. Un certain pays. 1985.

Overture: a certain land in the near future. Among the ruins of industrial civilization (everywhere plastic home depot bags and starbucks cups) people scrounge for leftover tomato soup cans, and lawns with dandelions to eat or the last ounce of petrol in the bottom of deep pits dug into the sites of old gas stations. In the dark, treeless, concrete infested parts of the land people swollen close to starvation, survive like vultures on the already gone. Then they celebrate by taking a flatscreen plasma tv and smashing it on the ground to see the sparks. Not a single cat or dog or squirrel is to be seen here.

Ricochet: an alien spaceship flashes by, slingshotting around the sun like a comet, long tail of fusion carrying it towards the land. Inside they watch a Nat Geo video of the forests of indonesia teeming with orangutangs.

Amalgame: One intrepid human manages to grind maple seeds into flour with an elliptical machine. Another is seen to slice and dice some grass and water into soup, but it quickly breaks. One is chopping up pigeons with a lawnmower. Another marks his territory with a printer toner cartridge, getting it all over his True Religion Jeans. He curses, takes a bite out of a kraft "fun cheez shapes". Still tastes good, centuries after it was made! Another human is vacuuming up ants from the sidewalk to eat with a still-working dustbuster with batteries. When the batteries run out soon he uses it to dig himself a home in the ground. Another walks by with rotten crabapples in a wheelbarrow made of a small filing cabinet on top of two large rolodexes full of important business contacts. One pulls in a fishing net with 2 dead oysters, no fish, with rope made of linked rolex watches. Next to him, a woman with several toilet plungers is catching tiny crawdads.

Depression: Time has passed, but badly. Few are left by now, scraping by on the last pizza pockets and whole foods granola mix bins forgotten by the others. Thank god they didn't like the mix, they say to themselves. Mothers cry as they watch their children die before their eyes, reaching to give them a plastic waterproof Thomas the Tank Engine in comfort. They give them sweet splenda packets to suck not realizing it has zero calories and will not sustain them.

Albatros: Everywhere birds-- mostly pigeons and sparrows-- fill the sky. The age of dinosaurs passed to the age of mammals, which has now ended, but the age of birds is now set to start. An albatross lands outside a shelter made of lego. Inside the last couple left alive looks out. He throws his golf putter weapon towards it but misses: "oh damned sport!" he says next, activating a golf ball shooting machine, but of course, the balls bounce harmlessly off the bird. Instead the bird starts to peck at the too weak to move woman clothed in tattered Furstenberg head to toe. It turns away disgusted by the taste of her recycled-plastic crocs.

Hiver: The aliens armed with impossibly powerful laser guns land from their ship, millions strong, to conquer what years ago they saw was a green and fertile land of forest and fish-filled seas, ready to enslave the population just like the conquistadors did with the natives of the new world. Instead there is nothing left alive to enslave. The leader kicks away a still-working ipad in disgust. "Not even any fossil fuels left here..." he-she says. His-her second in command comments: "How ironic... They escaped their fate, through self-destruction." The leader promptly shoots him dead. He hates irony, as indeed all good leaders should.

This album is a bona-fide masterpiece. As I've mentioned before, and repeated before, again and again, someone spent a lot of time writing this music, and it shows. What makes it great is the quality of the composition and the cohesiveness of the whole, it plays out like a long symphony, the pieces connect together perfectly. A digital piano performs like a concerto with a very odd sounding orchestra full of echoes and soundtrack effects, occasionally even duetting with an acoustic grand. The orchestra is not annoying in the way for ex. The Enid's is, because it is subjected to so many effects like reverb and because thankfully the string section has been given the day off to brush up on their dumb mozart. Very dramatic crashes of brass and woodwinds and punctuations of huge chords make for a really interesting auricular experience. There is no guitar at all. The melodies are very original, sounding like my man Igor S trying to create a rock album. The dark, very characteristically pessimistic style of advanced french prog is in evidence here, like Yves et Alain Lorentz, Shylock, Yog Sothoth, Carpe diem. The closest similar album is probably British Craft from the eighties, or russian Horizont's two albums, whose digital piano use is very similar. It's shocking this came out in the 1980s, at the same time as Duran Duran et al. What were these musicians thinking?? Thank god they couldn't have cared less about the zeitgeist of dance dance dance and I want my MTV and neon green short shorts...

L'albatros...