Op-ed: Frankfurt Helmet’s entrancing world of one-word sci-fi stories
Editor’s Note: After recently meeting the Chinese electronic trio Frankfurt Helmet in a barn in the Faroe Islands at G! Festival, somehow the discussion segued from the local IPAs to the world of modern micro-stories.
Throughout their trans-media performances, the group projects snippets of sci-fi non-sequiturs that somehow seemingly connect by virtue of life’s ripples into something complete. Here, in an exclusive op-ed, the band delve into the whys and wherefores of the entrancing world they create through music, words and art…
The band explain: “On our first full-length album, Individuals, a dystopian reckoning was considered. The music on the album is like a gateway to a deep, unknown, and mysterious civilisation. It stands in stark contrast to the present world, yet draws us in like a black hole, beckoning us to slowly follow the sound to the centre of the world.
Individuals constructs a unique worldview from within the band’s subconscious, standing majestically before us. Beneath the constellation, the whole is attributed to the existence of each individual. Their connections and distant gazes scatter despair into the shimmering starlight.
The album’s narrative could be strung together into a sci-fi story, music should be felt, and everyone who hears it should build their own unique imagination and imagery. “One-Sentence Sci-Fi” is a series of micro-stories based on each song from the album.”
- Raw Saw Law
One day, AI announced it had calculated the laws of the universe, which included one limitation: no self-aware individual was allowed to see them.
- Iteritas
Humans constantly modified themselves, from body to mind. After each upgrade, the previous version of humanity would suddenly become riddled with glitches.
- Grain
“Do you know what’s on the other side of the moon?”
“I do. In this timeline, a mirror can only ever show you the back of your own head.”
- Patch
Scientists finally discovered that no matter how a historical simulator scrambled time or inverted cause and effect, humans could always tell a perfectly convincing story.
- Satellite
After taking off, the commander felt that all his experiences were déjà vu. He later realised he had mixed up the coordinates for “time” and “space”.
- 0o0o
Fully armed, he defeated the entire world. But, consumed by loneliness, he was forced to constantly replicate himself to create new enemies.
- Piece
The child broke his mother’s favourite porcelain. As he tried to piece the fragments back together, he instead created countless versions of his mother.
- Fantasy
In the future, another species describes 21st-century humans this way: “They entered the quicksand age. The harder they struggled, the deeper they sank, until they learned to stop resisting and became part of the sand.”
- Individuals
When the collective consciousness of Earth’s humans finally took shape and slowly rose, they believed they had earned a ticket to a higher-level civilisation. But then they heard a voice say, “This generation of humans is flawed. They still don’t understand that collective wisdom cannot hide individual folly.”
The band continue: “One-Sentence Sci-Fi” stories were written by renowned sci-fi author Chen Qiufan, based on his interpretation and imagination of each track on our album. He has won numerous domestic and international awards, including multiple Global Chinese Science Fiction Nebula Awards, the Chinese Galaxy Award, the World Fantasy Award for Translation, the Asia Weekly Top Ten Novels of the Year, and the Mao Dun Newcomer Prize. His works have been translated into over 20 languages.
These simple, short sentences and abstract images can spark countless plots and storylines. Music and perception are the guides for our imagination: “In life, we often hear and see words like ‘the majority’, which seem to imply that because most people are a certain way, you should be too. It seems the world’s machine operates, and we navigate through its cold mechanisms, hoping for rules to explain and guide everything. But when we try to use one collective rule to explain it all, will we get what we want?
Within the music, the whole constructed in each song is ultimately the connection between its details. Every note is an irreplaceable part, just as the existence of you, me, and others creates this world, rather than the whole existing before the details.
During the two years we spent creating this album, we saw the turning machine, the cold formations, desolate fantasies, the loneliness of facing the unknown, and vast fragments of dust like stars. Their mutual shimmering connects the light that shines through the darkness.”
