Back to the Future

Back in the '80s, the future promised relief from recession, Star Wars (the movie and the missile defense), synth pop, break dancing, Madonna, and a Bush in the White House. Now that the present is that future, we find that everything that wasn't supposed to still be here is, only it's all slightly different. Like watching the enhanced anniversary edition of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, our recollection of the past seems to have been subtly altered. As San Francisco experimental synth pop outfit Memory Systems puts it, "Memory isn't what it used to be."

This slogan is at the root of what Phoenix Perry -- Memory Systems' singer, visual artist, and co-producer -- calls "post-futurism," defined as "not the study of the future, but what the future should have been." She came up with the idea while curating an art exhibit in 2000 called "Air Portugal II" at S.F.'s Pond Gallery, in which she saw a unifying theme to the various works. Most of the art juxtaposed old and new technology, such as projecting the television news through a microscope and using a plant's electrical impulses to determine the sequence of video images displayed on a computer.

Around the time of "Air Portugal II," Perry went to a show by early electronic musician Morton Subotnick and met Brian Jackson, Memory Systems' future co-producer and synthesizer specialist. Recognizing a shared taste for '80s keyboard bands and a fascination with the way the future seemed to be stagnating, the pair came up with a flurry of projects for bringing people together around these concepts. Unfortunately, after planning to institute a community Web site at www.form8.com, both artists developed repetitive stress disorder from computer jobs and couldn't devote the number of typing hours required. (A friend currently updates the site, which serves as an info source for the club night "Synth.") The couple then decided to focus their energies on one of the quintessential artifacts of the post-futurist present: the synthesizer. Considered hypermodern in the '50s yet still capable of suggesting a sci-fi aesthetic today, the instrument became the theme of "Synth," Perry and Jackson's floating electro/new wave/abstract techno party, and the centerpiece of Memory Systems, both of which began around February 2001.

Although Perry and Jackson clearly revel in the trendy '80s renaissance -- booking campy Euro-disco tribute act Hong Kong Counterfeit and Finnish robot funksters Mr. Velcro Fastener among others for "Synth" -- they maintain a critical distance from the genre, in an effort to play with its tropes. They formulated a business model, for instance, to capitalize on this brave but not so new world, with its atrophied confidence in a different tomorrow. "The idea is that we don't live in our future, we live in The Future," Perry explains from the pair's shared Haight-Ashbury apartment, "the future that's white and sterile and where everything's backed up on database. Everybody's thoughts and memories and ideas are able to be traded and stored -- now you can buy certain experiences and dreams. So the idea for Memory Systems is that we're selling these memories, and they can be tailored to your desires."

"Don't let repressed memories stop you from enjoying your present," Jackson adds in mock voice-over. "For example, we can change your memories of getting bullied so you can remember being the man your dad told you to be."

Memory Systems offers such products in the following formats: audio (its nostalgic renditions of the Top 40 keyboard sound of the Reagan years), visual (corresponding video clips from some vaguely futuristic cityscape), and conceptual (faux advertising mottoes interspersed in the videos). During live performances, the group weaves together music, video art by Perry and her collaborator Jenny Young, and projected messages like "Changing the face of identity since 2001," "Making Scientology obsolete," and "Memory Systems -- it takes the fear out of living." At first blush, the presentation appears to be very much in line with the retro '80s kitsch -- Perry and Young wear long red gloves and fitted, military-style black dresses, and Jackson wields a goofy Buck Rogers- looking bass -- but the sloganeering and existential film narratives suggest that the irony runs deeper.

"We're definitively trying to make you uncomfortable with some of the ideas we present," Perry says. "Like with the new video we're filming, Brian's carrying a briefcase that has some unstated value in this futuristic society, and he's being chased endlessly, but you're not sure why. There's no real direction or point to the story; it's as if the information that you're supposed to be getting has become empty. Then at the end, the case finally comes open, and it's full of blank paper. All he can do in the movie is run, but he doesn't know even why he's doing it."