Mike Sarto Releases New Music

Michele Sarto (“Mike” to those closest to him; other people just
can’t pronounce the name properly) is best known for his alias of Kish
Kollectiv  he also is known as South Central Positronics. His releases
under this guise are more SciFi related but not your run of the mill
science fiction but more  along the lines of Dime Novel Pulp Fiction
tradition.  It’s a SciFi theatrical musical journey.
https://album.link/us/i/1579025888 [1]
The latest release is best put in the musician’s own words:  The title
and inspiration for the second South Central Positronics release comes
from a late seventies novel by the German author and philosopher Ernst
Jünger. Jünger was a fascinating and sometimes controversial figure
who had a very long and interesting life that included service in two
world wars and a keen interest in such disciplines as botany, zoology
and biology. He also became a noted entomologist. His 1939 novel “On the
Marble Cliffs” has been interpreted as a critique of the then incumbent
National Socialist regime, of which Jünger was no admirer.

The setting of “Eumeswil” is a North African city-state of the same
name, in some post-apocalyptic future that is only tangentially
referenced. The main protagonist and narrator of the novel is Martin
Venator, a historian who enjoys a position and privilege in the outer
edges of the ruling dictator’s (known simply as the “Condor”) circle.
Some of the technology described seems to foreshadow such modern
features as the smartphone, the internet and even genetic engineering.
The pragmatic Venator has found a way to exist within the framework of
an authoritarian regime while maintaining a high degree of individual
and intellectual freedom, the embodiment of an archetype Jünger
labelled the “anarch”. In many ways, it is not an easy book; such was
the level of Jünger’s erudition, the modern reader finds himself or
herself constantly turning to Google to understand some of the
historical, cultural and philosophical references…at least this one
did. It is, however, worth the effort.

Musically, the album features a sequence of instrumental pieces that
draw upon 1990s electronica, hip-hop and trip-hop styles, such as the
Eurodance-influenced “Luminar”, the seductive late night vibes of
“Latifah” and the eerily lilting and wintry-sounding “Hyperboreans”.
Each loosely references various concepts and characters from the novel,
culminating in the climactic nine minute monster, “Forest Passage”
(incidentally also the name of one of Jünger’s earlier works),
reflecting the final traversal of Venator (along with benign dictator
the Condor and his trusted henchmen) into the wild woodlands at the
edges of the territory beyond Eumeswil.

Born of Italo-Celtic stock into a slowly rusting northern England in the
throes of Thatcher-era de-industrialisation, the young Michele Sarto
(“Mike” to those closest to him; other people just can’t pronounce
the name properly) was bitten by the horror bug early. After having been
“encouraged” to sit through an uncut version of Lucio Fulci’s
surreal schlock masterpiece “City of the Living Dead” at the age of
6 by mischievous elder cousins, a lifelong fascination with the darker
side of fiction was born. Equally haunted and excited by aftermath
images of reanimated corpses, horrific “skull-crush” kills and a
young woman literally vomiting out her innards, another element of that
particular production was to make an indelible impression on the young
Sarto; the maestro Fabio Frizzi’s masterful synthesizer-driven score.
https://twitter.com/SPositronics [2]