ASSEMBLER On his long-awaited second album, Yen Tech plunges the listener into the libidinal excess of the techno-accelerationist psyche. "It certainly feels like the conspiratorial, and the effacement of accuracy or reality, has suddenly become a disturbingly apt model for our times – this user-driven system for propagation where information, symbols and agency have all become intertwined and deployed into a kind of deranged cellularised game-form. We can all move this information around in this gross way now, to play with our food so to speak. It also seems that how we experience all of this, or situate our own agency within these systems is as some form of micro-conspiracy, these layers of vulnerability and augmentation that we are subconsciously and constantly exfoliating. Social exchange and surveillance devices, smart-assistants and AI “suggestions”, all this becomes a bit of a rabbit hole in itself. This is maybe a conceptual leap but it does feel this way, like we are all performing these intense calculations all the time, without any real understanding of the problem. How we form less inherently problematic relationships with technology, instead of accepting a base level complicity and our own pocket-versions of autonomy within this, seems to be the real challenge going forward, and I do think open-ended speculative practices are the best way to do this."