How a sci-fi dystopia became a personal utopia (ft. Arc Iris)
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What is the concept behind the iTMRW project?
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Every week, Switched on Pop opens with a windup of tape loops, layers of vocals, and some very funky Moog synthesizers.
Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. That is our show's sonic identity that we documented on episode 401. We called it the biggest theme song fail. We gave our very outdated theme a little glow up with the help of musicians Jossie Adams and Zach Tenario. Jossie and Zach, alongside drummer Ray Belli, are in a band together called Arc Iris. They've been around as a group pretty much as long as we've been a podcast. They're genuinely some of the most talented musicians I've ever known and are a deep source of inspiration to me. Since you hear them every week on the show, I wanted to give you a chance to get to know Jossie and Zach through some of their music. Music that has helped me find a sense of hope to combat these dystopian times.
I hope you'll feel the same.
Can we just start by, can I ask, who are you? My name is Zach Tenorio and I play keyboards with Arc Iris.
My name is Jossie Adams and I play bits and bobs and I sing and arrange and write for Arc Iris.
And we make pretty wild music? Yeah.
You have a project coming out called iTomorrow that has been long in the works. What is iTomorrow?
iTomorrow is a hopeful yet quite dystopian futuristic concept record. It started as a performance art piece. In 2020, we had a performance of the performance art piece, or maybe I should call it a, what do we call it?
A sci-fi ballet.
A sci-fi ballet.
A sci-fi ballet.
All the little piggies come out and they want to
iTomorrow is the name of the record, but it's also the name of the mega corporation that basically rules the world in 2080. iTomorrow.
We today.
We start with a sort of dystopian broadcast jingle. Followed by like a pleasant music bed to an advertisement. Free of charge. But there's something a little discordant about it. A little sinister. And a narration, we are introduced into a sci-fi world. What the heck is going on in the world of iTomorrow?
That's just to give a shout out. That's our friend Noah Harley, who plays the voice of Lucian Gregg, who is the, we call him the face of iTomorrow. He's like the spokesman for iTomorrow. And then that's also our friend Willow, Willow Smith, who is the voice of the virtual ration guy.
Where does this future world lead us?
Well, the story of iTomorrow takes place in 2080. And there's our everyman, Robert. And in this first track, Virtual Rations, a lot of us are out of jobs, so we don't really have a purpose. And if we do have a job, many of the most interesting aspects of our job are taken by AI. And a lot of the thinking that we would be doing is stolen by AI. And so the solution that this giant corporation comes up with is that they create a bunch of AI driven pods that supposedly enrich our lives. And here in the song, we see Robert making his daily visit to the virtual rations pod where one can dream any dream and live said dream through virtual reality.
Everything looks pretty in here. I got ladies doing their satellite dance. And they're flipping around with rubies and pearls in their hair. They can be gifts or booze and treasures. Look at the body in front of my chest.
I know tether. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.
Shame. Disconnecting from Robert's brain.
And so you make this sci-fi ballet, you're putting on these performances, and then what happens?
So we did two shows at Oberon in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was January of 2020. So you know what happens next.
Yeah.
global pandemic happens yeah exactly and we were all set to do a new york premiere of the show at le passant rouge and yeah basically the day before that show that was when like the full mass lockdown uh happened so the show died and the spirit of i tomorrow was lost for a while yeah
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