Rhys Langston is an artist from Los Angeles who has been releasing music since the mid-2010s. In that time, he’s given us ambitious and creative projects like Aggressively Ethnically Ambiguous, Language Arts Unit, and Grapefruit Radio. He’s also worked with such artists as Koreatown Oddity, Fatboi Sharif, and Black Milk, just to name a few. His last project came just this past February, when he teamed up with Canadian artist Andrew Mbaruk to release Affect Theory and the Text-to-Speech Grandiloquence. Now he’s back with a new project done in collaboration with Pioneer 11, To Operate This System.

Pioneer 11 is a trio from California who have been releasing music since the mid-2010s as well, also working with POW Recordings as they crafted their own style of psychedelic electronic music/hip hop. To craft the music on this album, Langston and Pioneer 11 went in with the philosophy of exploring our relationship to technology alongside the creative process, finding that unique space where human manipulation of technology leads to artistic expression of the soul. Or, in their words, “this is machine-made by hand.” In a more practical sense, what we end up getting is hip hop that sounds largely influenced by Kraftwerk and early synth pop, which interestingly enough leads to some of Langston’s most “pop” moments in his career thus far. Don’t get it twisted, though. Despite some really melodic lines and killer hooks, there is still the dense, philosophical lyricism that Langston has become known for, as he explores these questions of man and machine and our ever-evolving relationship with technology. As a result, it becomes a project that will draw you in with the promise of fun, danceable pop with some big sing-along moments, but then confronts you with a lot of thought-provoking and difficult questions about the nature of mankind and our technological creations.

Rhys Langston has become one of the most interesting artists to emerge out of Los Angeles in recent years, and he found some really compelling collaborators in Pioneer 11. You always hope that collaboration leads to art that wouldn’t have been made by one participant on their own, and that is definitely what happened here on To Operate This System. Certain thoughts might have been swirling around Langston’s head, but they wouldn’t have sounded quite like this without Pioneer 11 pushing him in a different direction that he hasn’t gone in up to this point. It’s a really fascinating and fun album to listen to.