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Amid the dreary wasteland of modern technology, Black nerdom might save us yet. Southside Chicago producer Angel Day was raised on bionic cartoons and anime like Cyborg 009 and Mega Man, and beamed into new worlds at the Galloping Ghost arcade; the gameplay jingles and sprinting anisong they heard would later feed into their passion for Black diasporic techno. Spinning and producing under the name Yesterdayneverhappened, their second album, search bar, is a 22-minute electronic suite of breakcore, footwork, and jungle that sounds as if composed on a cyberdeck. Thrashing and transcendent, each track on search bar scores personal memory into mythic proportions, aglow with memorabilia-filled parallel universes realized enough to meditate, grieve, and groove in.
search bar hits the refresh button on classic Midwest techno, jazz, and rap. “Afro-breaking” samples the psychedelic opener of Dorothy Ashby’s 1968 album Afro-Harping, like a decades-spanning portal connecting the soul-infused harp instrumental with the intuitive, experimental consciousness of breakbeat. Over two minutes, a spectrum of Black improvisational styles battle on what feels like a Red Planet, interspersed with video game chirps and tectonic-shifting airblasts that cool the magma cooked up during combat, each one building off the other’s energy.
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The celestial footwork of “Do it like me,” featuring username, casts Soulja Boy as aura-checking final boss, backed up by a legion of mechanized Bucket Boys: Do your dance to end the curse, or 99 years bad ParkChicago luck. “Is it..?” unlocks a nocturne bonus stage of Kanye West’s “Addiction,” melting down its lyrics and speaker-knocking the breeze out of its congos until your knees can’t bob no more. Day also draws influence from Hideki Naganuma’s funk- and hip-hop-inflected scores for Sonic and Jet Set Radio. The synths of “Groovebody” set this level in a crystalline atmosphere smooth enough for microgravity off-roading, and its glittering vocals are anchored by a nasty bassline. It reminds me that the deuteragonists always have sicker sound design, and of those iconic Adult Swim bumps that signaled a smoke break was nigh.
search bar is dedicated to Day’s family and memorializes the spirit of their late baby brother, Josiah. They sprinkle in audio from one of their favorite games to play together, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, to both “This is breakbeat,” a poignant siren symphony, and “You got that,” a coiling piano beat that I cannot stop freestyling to. But it’s the chorus of “Without u,” written and performed by NYC-based DJ and producer babygh0st, that transmutes pain into an awakened state: “I can feel you here all around me still/It’s the only thing that I know is real.” The filtered delivery and 8-bit melody share code with Japanese Vocaloid music. Intertwined with DJ Spinn’s historic record “Bounce N Break Yo Back,” it lands like an enchantment, inducing a cathartic juke jam.
My favorite, though, is “Jungle instruction video,” produced with 3mouth. Its initial ear-splitting pandemonium sources bars and barks from “If Yuh Ready” by Spragga Benz and General Levy, blasting lasers to accentuate the hats. They then splice in the “Bam Bam” riddim that birthed so many dancehall and reggaeton classics. The bass is like Godzilla approaching, rumbling glasses of water hundreds of miles away and activating stank faces far and wide. This is the culmination of Yesterdayneverhappened’s silver-handed experiments throughout search bar. Each adventure helps construct a massive iron robot to confront the chaos outside their analog studio sanctuary, sizing up the fire like their hip-hop hero Lord Quas, and cheered on by their trusty collectible figurines. Trance rolls in and the ambience turns into hope. Body-hacking is how they’ll play throughout the night, and seeing the daybreak is triumph enough.
