Rhys Langston x Pioneer 11 (CREDIT: Emily Berkey)

Cutting-edge Los Angeles-based trio dubbed Rhys Langston x Pioneer 11 have announced a new collaborative effort, To Operate This System, set to drop in a couple months on Passion of The Weiss & The LAnd Magazine founder Jeff Weiss' own P.O.W. Recordings. The self=proclaimed "Poet Laureate of Your Living Room," Rhys Langston joins forces with the psychedelic cosmonauts Pioneer 11 (Bryan Gomez & Alex Hastings) to chart new terrain grounded in extraterrestrial R&B, Hip-Hop, Acid House, deep space Dance music, and cosmic Soul. Pioneer 11 & Rhys Langston are, indeed, not here to bury the computer, they're here to save it. Their sprawling eight-track debut, To Operate This System, is an attempt to become one with the wires and bytes—to fuse the most cherished qualities of humanity with the power of the matrix. Crunch the data and you might receive only computative errors. After all, it is difficult to find a coherent analogue to the rare alchemy of such unexpected collaborators.


First, there's Player 1: Rhys Langston, an Art-Rap wunderkid who The New York Times recently lauded as "virtuosic and defiantly nonchalant." His hometown paper, The Los Angeles Times, shared the praise, hailing his "wry humor" and originality. Langston stylistically falls somewhere in-between Saul Williams & Saul Bellow, Beck & Bad Brains. Something special happened in the alliance with Pioneer 11, the Psychedelic Dance cosmonauts, whose gravity unmoored orbits split the difference between DARKSIDE & J Dilla; or as The FADER once said, their music is the "best way to feel lost in space without having to face the eternal abyss." In a bleak landscape where artists angle to create the easily classifiable, this emerges as a new phylum: extraterrestrial R&B grounded in Hip-Hop and Acid House with abstract expressionist lyrics about human obsolescence in the era of A.I. and absurdist crooning about house cats lost in outer space. An upcoming release on P.O.W. Recordings, To Operate This System features poetic interludes about post-Earth realities and being trapped in alien ride-share apps.


Herein, there are incandescent raps over Twilight Zone Yacht Rock, deep space Dance music in the vein of a 31st Century Devo, and Psychedelic Soul set to Soviet-era synths. Langston & Pioneer 11 were initially booked in 2018 to play on a P.O.W. artists showcase hosted at Dublab. They linked up again at a fundraiser for Weiss' subterranean magazine, The LAnd, before finally deciding to get together to jam. An inaugural session yielded sounds akin to a Massive Attack dub remix of Freestyle Fellowship. And then, The Pandemic struck... When it was finally safe to return to the studio together, their second meeting produced lead single, "Amber Deception"—a dystopian hallucination of crumbling RAM chips, old video game consoles being played in a ghost note afterlife, and quicksilver man vs. machine soul. The nascent trio knew they were divining a singular vision. A series of weekly meetings quickly led to a fully-formed EP. The group considered stopping there, but aware of the ease of creation, they kept going. All songs were recorded live.

Rhys Langston x Pioneer 11 - "Amber Deception" single artwork and To Operate This System album artwork (SOURCE: P.O.W. Recordings)

Each artist is a multi-instrumentalist and so, the system is a sturdily and quirkily constructed with guitar, bass, synthesizers, MPC drum machines, and even woodwinds. There was no standard arrangement of what sounds to be used or even who would play them. Intuition guided them in the moment. When it was finished, they handed it over to the GRAMMY Award-winning engineer, Daddy Kev (Busdriver, Flying Lotus, Myka9) for mastering. In the age of the post-genre soup, where artists and corporations extend past their strengths in an attempt to satisfy more markets, Rhys Langston & Pioneer 11 have blended and charted new terrain without dilution or acquiescence to the sentient algorithm. They have forged an important link between analogue and digital, humanistic and electronic rhythms, Science Fiction and terrestrial reality. To Operate This System is a vital, artistic expression of humans thinking with and through technology: a warm-blooded resurrection snatched from cold steel claws.Rhys Langston x Pioneer 11's To Operate Theis System is out July 26, 2023 on P.O.W. Recordings.