Hip-hop moves beyond materialism for a more planetary perspective in Earthbound, the debut record from soulful sci-fi trio CopperWire. The musical space opera’s cosmological bounce is finely tuned for listeners who are as plugged into NASA and SETI as they are into Digable Planets and Sun Ra.
“From the smallest atomic scale to the largest galaxy, you see a series of patterns that in my opinion indicates everything is part of [some] finely calibrated mechanism, be it ‘God’ or the source code for a unified theory,” CopperWire rapper Ellias Fullmore, aka Burntface, told Wired.com by e-mail. “We have always looked to the ‘heavens’ as a means of understanding ourselves, but humanity has grossly lost perspective on what’s actually happening.”
The group created Earthbound to help reorient listeners beyond that sort of modern tunnel vision. The record’s future-hop space fable, as described in liner notes by award-winning sci-fi author Nnedi Okorafor, casts CopperWire members as characters that journey to Earth in the year 2089 to learn what it means to be human. They include mad scientist Scholar Black (Burntface), alien-human hybrid Getazia (Gabriel Teodros) and interstellar telepath Ko Ai (Meklit Hadero).
LISTEN: ‘Stories’ by CopperWire
Free download (MP3)Along the way, as seen in the extraterrestrial visitation video for “Phone Home” below, the Ethiopian-American space-hop trio encounters everything from jazz legend Mulatu Astatke to the sonified light curves of SETI Institute researcher Jon Jenkins.
Also a NASA Kepler Labs analyst, Jenkins’ inaudible star sounds — mashed through Fourier analysis into frequencies that can be heard by humans — have been appropriated into Earthbound’ s sonic explorations. (Stream or download a free copy of hypnotic track “Stories” at left.)
CopperWire’s connection to Jenkins came through TED fellow Hadero, who was intrigued by the scientist’s story. “His mentor was a blind astrophysicist who started a tradition of audiolizing data, giving our different senses the chance to interpret information to make it more real,” Hadero told Wired.com by e-mail. “In our live shows, I play the StarGuitar, which is an electronic mix of guitar and Jon’s star sounds.”
The band’s lineage is as mixed as its StarGuitar and space opera. By the time Hadero hit 24, she had lived in 12 cities on three continents. Burntface’s roots run backward from Los Angeles and Texas to Ethiopia, which his family fled after Haile Selassie was removed from power. Tedoros, whose parents came from different countries, told Wired.com by e-mail that his childhood “helped me see how important it is to both hold on to your culture and how much we all have in common.”
The members of CopperWire, who are currently on tour, also have shared a deep love of scientific and sci-fi possibility since they were toddler cosmonauts. Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space 9, Parliament-Funkadelic, Back to the Future, Octavia Butler and novelist Okorafor are all heavy influences. (“I was reading [Okorafor’s] brilliant novel Who Fears Death the last week we were recording Earthbound,” said Tedoros. “Her vision of a post-apocalyptic East Africa was such good medicine.”)
Their shared worldview informs the sound of Earthbound, which was released last week, as well as a cool remix app for one of the record’s tracks.
“The idea of making music from a galactic perspective gives you the opportunity to make up an entire world for sound to exist in,” said the beat-making Burntface, who’s also the 3-D modeler, graphic designer and “general nerd” responsible for CopperWire’s “Phone Home” remix Android app. Created by AppSynth Media (co-founded by Burntface and cohorts Clare Lewis and Jateen Bhakta), the app’s algorithms can generate nearly 2 million distinct variations of “Phone Home” based on any 10-digit phone number.
“I love that in the TED world, being a sci-fi hip-hop group that’s making a suite of apps makes perfect sense.”
“I love that in the TED world, being a sci-fi hip-hop group that’s making a suite of apps makes perfect sense,” said Hadero.
Earthbound is an excellent first album from the trio of talents, whose solo careers have converged to create some much-needed space-hop in a rap game whose latest, greatest event has been a “holographic” Tupac.
“One of my very favorite books is called The Home Planet,” said Hadero. “It’s 300 pages of photographs of Earth from space, with quotes from astronauts from every country that has ever sent anyone into the cosmos. Their perspective fundamentally changed when they saw our planet from up there. All that fragility, all that clamor, one little piece of whirling rock.”
