Myst Milano – Beyond The Uncanny Valley

Many music scholars and fans alike possess the belief that the dancefloor represents a kind of sacred zone, able to transcend typical dogmatic social restrictions held and preserved by oppressive cultures. Such a belief might also be held by Toronto-based rapper, DJ and producer Myst Milano, whose second record Beyond The Uncanny Valley uses dance culture as a vehicle to challenge the impurity of Black diaspora on the one hand and to explore their concerns with the cybernetic world on the other. Milano is concerned with the world becoming hyperreal – this idea that our lives are experienced so heavily through the technological world that we no longer feel a tangible relationship with the physical one. In the record’s press materials, they asks: “Who are we when we become perfect imitations of what the world wants instead of who we really are, which is imperfect, flawed and a little uncanny, anyway?”

On Beyond The Uncanny Valley, a sharp political focus fills the crosshairs of a type of music which often sounds like the soundtrack to someone’s particularly heavy weekend clubbing. The lyrical focus of this album points, at times, to smacking “chubby” asses, signing “boobies” and “snake cocks” (no idea what they are…). At those points, I may struggle to identify where all of the political theory mentioned in the release notes comes into the music itself; but regardless, this album is full to the brim of absolute bangers, from start to finish. As opening track ‘Thirteen’ fittingly declares, “This is some real shit that you can’t ignore.”