Discovery Zone - Quantum Web

Quantum Web is the new album from Discovery Zone, the experimental pop project of New York born, Berlin based musician and multi-media artist JJ Weihl. After the slow-building but undeniable fervor around Remote Control, Discovery Zone’s debut album, Quantum Web quite literally picks up where JJ left off. In what she considers an ongoing, process oriented continuum, Quantum Web is the next evolutionary phase of Discovery Zone– arranging the past, present, and future across the infinite, invisible web that interconnects us all.

Inspired by the omnipresence of advertising and corporate culture as much as the potential of cybernetics and neural networks, Discovery Zone plunges into an uncanny valley with Quantum Web, where the distinctions between the earnest and the ironic blur in tandem with the border between the human and the post-human. JJ wrote a number of Quantum Web’s songs for Cybernetica, a multimedia performance she was commissioned in 2021. Cataloging her daily activities as data points to be analyzed, she broke her life down into statistics and presented them onstage to a live audience, depersonalizing her experience while claiming it for herself in all its mundane yet intimate detail. Quantum Web casts JJ in a concordant role: a pop star mediated by machines, just as willing to sink anonymously into her productions as she is to shine as their legible central figure.

On Quantum Web, Discovery Zone explores a widescreen pop sound speckled with luminous vocal performances and baroque instrumental flourishes. While JJ’s voice is focal and transfixing at the center of the composition, she contrasts moments of clarity with strategies of obfuscation through hi-definition synthesis and time-dilating ambience. Vocoded textures layer into dense choral networks. A.I. text-to-speech abruptly hits the mix like a loudspeaker announcement over a meditation session. Staccato samples of JJ’s disembodied voice pepper the arrangements, creating their own pointillist harmonic systems that play a role closer to synth patch than vocal take. Quantum Web draws power from this composite mosaic of inputs, as if to propose that all these forms still represent JJ’s core self no matter how far they might splinter from the sounds that came from her physical form.