Will the internet ever die? It seems impossible to even contemplate the web’s hypothetical demise, its impact on every facet of humanity so profound that the emerging digital age it ushered is considered as fundamental a turning point as the Industrial Revolution. Evolving and growing in ways light-years beyond what was originally envisioned at the birth of the World Wide Web in 1990, the Internet’s eventual obsoletion seems as distant as Earth’s destruction during the Sun’s red giant violent fatal expansion.

“Flash Player will no longer be supported after December 2020” didn’t you know? Are we so distracted in our slavish worship of Silicon Valley and the great social media deity sat atop the data cloud that the malignant necrosis killing off parts of our beloved Internet eat away in plain, pop-upped sight? This Cronenberg style mortality is a concept viscerally explored by North Carolina noise artist Max Eastman. Curator of Tribe Tapes and the culprit behind power electronics act Körperlich in addition to joining Lasse Jensen in avant-pop duo LongSatanInViolence, Eastman has been busy cutting an uncompromising blast of harsh sound collages under the moniker Greathumour. The third in his ‘Choose’ series, following Forceps and Speculum, Choose the Obsolete is a paranoid implosion of computer grindcore and digital mutilation.

“You’ll be amazed at the unexpected dangers” gurgles a corrupted speech synthesizer at the end of tape finale ‘var Stay = 0; // Number of seconds to keep window open function index1(){ setTimeout(“openFull(‘index1.html’,’_blank’,0);”,Stay * 1000); }’, to give its full name. Each title a dense string of defected embeds and dead URLs, the baffling bewilder of impenetrable code perfectly reflects the glitched mania within the degraded tape. A four and a half minute assault of bit-crushed samples and virus ravaged electronica, Eastman takes a dose of musique concrète as pioneered by Stockhausen, speeds things up by 1000000000000%, processed via a dodgy DAW crack and spiked with hellish evocations of 4chan nightmares, Pepe the Frog swastikas and meme nihilism. This unrelenting act of cyber terror is mercifully brief, each track a ‘microsound’ of bursting electrical fire which keeps the exercise in sonic affliction from losing its punch, but also touches on our collective attention spans dulled by the soup of infinite and instantaneous content, yellow tongue firmly in rancid cheek.

Long after man has blown himself up or the last corner of land finally lost under the rising ocean, the artefacts left behind studied by the evolved entities that follow probably won’t be The Mona Lisa or David, it’ll be The Golden Arches laid ruined on the beach à la Planet of the Apes, and frankly, it’s what we deserve. Choose the Obsolete captures this doomed farce with stinging precision, a time-capsule of the confused and uncertain milieu that hangs in the air and a potent document of the current end of history destined to be discovered in the next millennia underneath a rubble of Bee Movie DVDs, right-wing bumper stickers and MAGA caps.