A potent musical idea expressed by Wayne Shorter on his 1965 record etcetera has been decoded in 2020 by Steam Down and Afronaut Zu for this epic Blue Note Re:imagined album. A new layer of complexity has been emitted by this Afrofuturist orchestra. The beginning even sounds like their own unique version of morse code. The overall song maintains the original’s sense of the otherworldly, yet Steam Down take us in a bold new direction.
“Let go of the nonsense, all that you hear, yes you know them, the echoes in your ear“
An unprotected computer doesn’t last half an hour before it subjected to a barrage of malware and cyber-attacks. So what makes us humans think we can survive the media onslaught in an age of personalised fake news stories delivered by state-sponsored Artificial Intelligence bots that are smarter than us?
In this way, this song is like a major anthropomorphic defrag as we cast aside all of the nonsense redundant files that we are accumulating. We need to return to and rely on our own internal resources to ‘Steam Down’. We are also given a living example of how to achieve this by listening to the lyrics, phrasings and ad-lib expressions of Afronaut Zu, who delivers a fully committed performance.
The band produces a profoundly deep and immersive sound. There is great balance in the way it’s different components fit together as an ensemble and temporally within the song as the energy rises towards its crescendo and falls again.
As a final thought, this song encourages us not to live in etceteras. That each day we should have at least one moment, experience or thought that defies easy categorisation. Something that provides that same feeling of otherworldliness as the chorus, which reminds us that we are not machines.
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