JJ Weihl is the type of multidimensional pop songwriter who refuses to let her musical recordings as Discovery Zone exist solely as that, as appealing as her unique blend of heavenly indietronica and dream pop tends to be. Dating back to her 2020 debut Remote Control, Weihl’s music has evolved alongside her visuals—both her videography and her live show, which takes the form of an elaborate digital-age panorama that invokes countless visions of the future as predicted by 1980s Hollywood—as well as the philosophical bent her optimistic-yet-wary lyrical meditations on humankind’s accelerated fusion with the digital world we build tend to take. Her recent video for the single “All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go,” which cuts back and forth between Weihl as an angelic figure and her Second Life doppelgänger bumping into shit and wandering into portals to hell, sums that up pretty well.
This week, she’ll be releasing her sophomore album and first for RVNG Intl., Quantum Web, which that track appears on, and which dives even deeper into these ideas. Rather than asking what music inspired the project, we figured it would instead make more sense to hear what other influences worked their way into the project—such as one of those aforementioned ’80s movies predicting our present reality (the dystopian socioeconomic one, unfortunately, not the visually pleasing one). “The interconnectedness of humans and technology is becoming so ubiquitous that it’s often invisible,” she notes while breaking down another influence that eschews the tragedy and general ickiness of David Cronenberg’s popular ruminations on this precise topic. “I think what I’m trying to do with this record is to shine a light on some of that melted matter.”
With the record landing Friday, check out Weihl’s five picks below. You can pre-order Quantum Web here.
Angels singing caught on tape during choir practice
According to the person speaking in this video, thousands of actual angels were captured on tape singing and playing instruments. The explanation given? “Supernatural.” When I came across this recording, I listened to it many times. I ended up calling the first track on my record “Supernatural,” which begins with a choir of disembodied synthesized voices. It’s a tribute to the great mysteries of life, and the unexplained phenomena that we’re all blessed to experience forever on YouTube dot com. There are always ads, though, even before the angels sing to us from heaven. Unless you upgrade to Premium.
LD Deutsch’s “Technomythology”
“Are we living in a computer simulation?” So begins LD Deutsch’s prismatic essay exploring simulation theory through a mythological lens. Her approach to answering this question is akin to turning on the lights in a room full of mirrors. In every direction, we’re faced with our own reflection, transforming through and before our own nebulous gaze. We’re constantly creating new mythologies to try and keep up with our understanding of the world and our place in it, while simultaneously fearing the reality that we’ve created for ourselves. Deutsch writes, “As we become more embedded in our technologies, our psychic images of the human, the mind and the world transform… However at this point now, where we find ourselves in a hybrid state of existence, on a bridge between the future and the past, we encounter the simulation hypothesis.”
Asking the question she begins the essay with is clearly more important than answering it. It resonates with a lot of the themes I’m interested in exploring in the Discovery Zone. The interconnectedness of humans and technology is becoming so ubiquitous that it’s often invisible. I think what I’m trying to do with this record is to shine a light on some of that melted matter. I’m not really trying to answer questions so much as pose them. Is it all the same web that we weave, that connects us, that we’re caught in, and that we’re surfing?
Tron
In this ominous trailer for the original Tron, the voiceover says, “Soon the ultimate tool will become the ultimate enemy.” Jeff Bridges, who plays a computer programmer, breaks into the “Master Control Program” and gets sucked into the digital realm, where he has to fight his way back out. He gets uploaded into cyberspace and discovers (of course) that the MCP has been using its power as a big corporation to expand its virtual intelligence by stealing from private people and businesses. In the end (spoiler alert) the good guys win.
Not so, perhaps, in the current version of our own MCP dystopia which seems to be expanding eternally, in all directions. The soundtrack was composed by Wendy Carlos, which in and of itself is a big inspiration, not to mention the early computer graphics. Every frame is like a painting. When I perform live I use a 3D visual setup that’s certainly in the lineage of this kind of early virtual reality. Still waiting for the real-life Jeff Bridges to hack the mainframe and save us from the Master Control Program.
Second Life
This online platform allows people to create their own avatars and hang out with other “users” in “virtual reality.” It has long been a source of inspiration and material in Discovery Zone. I’ve teleported to islands, mountain ranges, shopping malls, museums, and still have so much more to explore! I’ve also written songs about it and incorporated different aspects into my music videos. I enjoy spending time in the mostly abandoned landscapes of Second Life, pondering my own place in the vast and ever-expanding universe of cyberspace.
Dictionary of Symbols
Purchased on a whim on a long forgotten holiday, this book has served me well throughout the years. Candles symbolize the passing of time, and I believe this picture was taken on the last day of the year 2020. It was around this time that I began working on the songs that eventually became Quantum Web, which is finally coming out over four years later!
