[Image: A map of fictional mega cities, via 2000AD].
A short review in the most recent Wire discusses a new album by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury: a speculative urban soundtrack to Mega City One, a “post-apocalyptic sprawl covering the eastern seaboard of the United States” from Judge Dredd. “Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and BBC soundtrack composer Ben Salisbury’s instrumental interpretation” of the city, The Wire writes, “evoke[s] the gunmetal grey of life in Mega City One, its multilevel labyrinth of self-contained blocks, zipstrips and boomways reflecting darkly in the album’s tarnished metallic textures and gridlike structures.”
The retro-Alan Howarthian synthesizers, a “rigorously imagined sound map” of the city, can be streamed in full via Bandcamp.
For those of you in London, meanwhile, Barrow and Salisbury will perform excerpts from the “weirdly addictive“—or is it “hackneyed“?—album at Orbital Comics on 16 May.