Each full moon they came. Materialising from sonic ether – one new Peter Gabriel composition every four weeks or so, slowbuilding over almost a year into his first full-length album of new material in over two decades, allowing his faithful and broadminded followers to live inside it, an edifice raised around them.
For all its references to futuristic technologies – giant AI globes keeping surveillance over our leaders; headsets that turn our thoughts into pictures – i/o’s most impressive invention, at first, appeared to be an actual time machine. With the appearance of the first tracks Panopticom and The Court it was as if no time had passed since 2002’s Up. These were songs steeped in the abrasive industrial menace of Darkness from Up, the crackling synth noir of Digging In The Dirt from 1992’s Us and the darkly funky afrobeats of Gabriel’s early 80s albums.
Their themes, however, placed them firmly in 2023 and beyond. The dynamic described an AI-era inversion of Jeremy Bentham’s maximumsurveillance panopticon building, instead using satellites to turn Big Brother’s cameras back on the overseers and their global wrong-doings. The haunting meanwhile, appeared to target social media’s indiscriminate mob justice
