Pioneer 11 and Rhys Langston are not here to bury the computer, they’re here to save it. In an age of digital avarice and algorithmic manipulation, the Los Angeles artists have created a system of their own, lest they be controlled by another. But don’t necessarily give into the fear. This is much more than a carnivorous screed against the techno-utopians. Their debut, To Operate This System, is an attempt to become one with the wires and bytes – to fuse the cherished qualities of humanity (soul, groove, unpredictability) with the power of the matrix. As the technologist Jaron Lanier has prophesized: “people are the answer to the problems of bits.” Or as the trio themselves describe their music: this is machine-made by hand.

Crunch the data and you might receive only computative errors. After all, it is difficult to find a coherent analogue to the rare alchemy of such unexpected collaborators. First, there is Rhys Langston, an art-rap polymath who the New York Times recently lauded as “virtuosic and defiantly nonchalant.” His hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, shared the praise, hailing his “wry humor” and originality. Langston is somewhere between Saul Williams and Saul Bellow, Beck and Bad Brains. Something special happened in the alliance with Pioneer 11, the psychedelic dance cosmonauts, whose gravity unmoored orbits split the difference between DARKSIDE and J Dilla. Or as the Fader once said: their music is the “best way to feel lost in space without having to face the eternal abyss.”

In a bleak landscape where artists angle to create the easily classifiable, this emerges as a new phylum: extraterrestrial R&B grounded in hip-hop and acid house with abstract expressionist lyrics about human obsolescence in the era of A.I and absurdist crooning about house cats lost in outer space. Released on POW Recordings, To Operate This System features poetic interludes about post-earth realities and being trapped in alien ride-share apps. There are incandescent raps over Twilight Zone yacht rock, deep space dance music in the vein of a 31st Century Devo, and psychedelic soul set to Soviet-era synths. “Golden Hour” sounds like a gorgeous sunset amidst a nuclear twilight of civilization.

It's perhaps unsurprising that such originality could only emerge from the fertile L.A. underground. Langston and Pioneer 11 were first booked in 2018 to play on a POW showcase at the anniversary of the legendary online radio station Dublab. They linked again at a fundraiser for the subversive L.A. subterranean magazine, theLAnd, before finally deciding to get together to jam. The session yielded “On My Own,” which sounds like a Massive Attack dub remix of Freestyle Fellowship. Then the pandemic struck. When it was safe to finally return to the lab, their second meeting produced lead single “Amber Deception” – a dystopian hallucination of crumbling RAM chips, old video game consoles being played in a ghost note afterlife, and quicksilver man vs. machine soul.

The nascent trio knew they were divining a singular vision. A series of weekly meetings quickly led to a fully-formed EP. The group considered stopping there, but aware of the ease of creation, they kept going. All songs were recorded live. Each artist is a multi-instrumentalist, and so, the system is a sturdily and quirkily constructed with guitar, bass, synthesizers, MPC drum machines, and even woodwinds. There was no standard arrangement of what sounds to be used ot even who would play them. Intuition guided them in the moment. When it was finished, they handed it over to the Grammy Award-winning engineer, Daddy Kev (Thundercat, Flying Lotus), for mastering.

In the age of the post-genre soup, where artists and corporations extend past their strengths in an attempt to satisfy more markets, Rhys Langston and Pioneer 11 have blended and charted new terrain without dilution or acquiescence to the sentient algorithm. They have forged an important link between analogue and digital, humanistic and electronic rhythms, science-fiction and terrestrial reality. To Operate This System is a vital, artistic expression of humans thinking with and through technology: a warm-blooded resurrection snatched from cold steel claws.