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Listen / Buy digital version here: ULLYSSES & STONE - Vanexa
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Vanexa fights in the 99th year of the Holistic Era in the League of Chrononauts, who protect the good future from the bad one.
Vanexa has the power to steal people's shadows, and tonight she wants to steal the shadow of Xiao Xiao, the illegitimate son of the Supreme Manager of the Asian Totalitarian Exchange visiting Moscow-5: she wants to ask for a millionaire ransom and thus finance the hacker-guerilla of the Digital Liberation Front.
However, a sniper kills Xiao Xiao before she can carry out her plan. The sniper is in agreement with the Chinese Secret Services: he fired a bullet containing the recipe for a cyber-poison which, if ingested by the broker-robots of the Free World Exchange, will corrupt their algorithms. The conspirators, by repatriating the young man's body, without arousing suspicion, will be able to bring to China the recipe for the poison with which they will blow up the Free World Exchange. The alarm has sounded at the headquarters of the League of Chrononauts!
Vanexa receives the instructions via SMS on her Motorola StarTac: it is up to her to retrieve the body of Xiao Xiao before it is expatriated and obtain the recipe for the poison. It's a race against time that will lead Vanexa into the old contaminated subway of Moscow-1, in the holographic red light district of Novosibirsk, among the mysteries of the suspended tent city of Ulan-Bator and finally to sneak into the techno-temple of the Shaolin Mafia in Beijing, for a thrilling final confrontation with the poltergeist of a famous patriarch of Ancient Communism, summoned by the evil Shaolin wizards.
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ULLYSSES & STONE, the authors of HDK weirdest albums called "Confessions of a Satan priestess" and "The Renegades of the Year Gamma", are back with a kaleidoscopic album, a blender of sonic oddities, the schizophrenic soundtrack of a world upside down and messed up.
"Vanexa" is a record poised between completely different genres, atmospheres and eras: a sound-crossroads where kraut-rock, minimal-techno, 70s b-movie soundtracks, proto-prog and retrowave crash into each other.
The musical melting pot offered by "Vanexa" is powerful and destabilizing: in a surreal overlap of esthetics and moods, "Vanexa" transports us to a parallel reality in which the conceptual and historical coordinates that we know no longer exist.
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LOOSE IDEAS FOR A ROLE-PLAYING GAME SETTING
The world we know, from the second post-war period onwards, has taken a different direction than the historical one. Science and technology have developed differently from what we know: in some areas they have developed more (engineering, architecture, psychology, medicine and... time travel), in others less so (computers, communications, transport). The Social-Bureaucracy party dominates in the West, but parties such as the United Opium Smokers and the Liberal Luddites have known a wide diffusion, conditioning the choices of governments in an anti-industrial and anti-technological direction. However, the Sovereign Markets (turbo-finance) are the true governors of the world; the world leaders are strange figures halfway between businessmen, gurus and algorithms who move enormous capital and decide the destinies of the humanity. Armed armies no longer exist, but they have been replaced but colossal agencies of espionage and industrial sabotage. Each country has been equipped with a thermonuclear bomb to avoid any possible war.
However, it is the discovery of time travel that has seriously shocked humanity: time travel is expensive and complicated, but above all prohibited, because it jeopardizes the stability of the historical continuum. Criminal agencies illegally sell one-way time travel. The chrono-police are tasked with stopping time travel and identifying travelers before they make the jump. When the chrono-police fails, a secret agency in the pay of a mysterious billionaire antagonist of governments and finance lobbies enters the field. This agency is called the "League of Chrononauts Heroes": the chrononaut heroes travel through time in defense of the historical continuum. The damage caused by time travel to the temporal fabric results in "glitches" of reality, phenomena of cancellation / deformation of reality that give life to ghosts, monsters, "wrong" creatures, strange and dangerous places, climatic oddities and slight bending of the space time.
The mission of the "League of Chrononauts Heroes" is to travel in time to "repair" the reality that has been damaged due to an interference in the time continuum. You are the League of Crononauti Heroes: get a move on, the fate of the world depends on you.