In the stylish and ominous music video for American electronic musician Com Truise’s “Propagation”, Will Joines and Karrie Crouse imagine a blonde, modelesque wife-bot named (played by Trieste Kelly Dunn) slowly gaining humanlike consciousness. Upon discovering her brochure (and her model name, Eve), she dreams of giving birth to another identical humanoid robot, and of a living room filled with five copies of herself. Her blue irises and sclera turn black; she tries cutting her palm and holding onto the surface of a hot iron. Instead of holding pool towels as her husband/owner takes a swim in his stately indoor pool, she drowns him in it. She assumes his (man-on-top) position in bed, making love to her own mask-charger. Instead of embracing her freedom, she repeats a ritual that is now redundant - waving goodbye at the door, even though her husband/owner can no longer go to work each morning.
The bass-heavy instrumental cut is the 6th track in Com Truise’s (aka Seth Haley) third studio album Iteration (2017). True to his aesthetic of “mid-fi synth-wave, slow-motion funk”, it features a kinetic midtempo momentum, which is occasionally interrupted by a slower sequence of trance-like synth melodies. It’s gleamingly futuristic yet conservative, sonically mirroring the Joines and Crouse’s troubling vision of a high-tech future with 1950s gender ideals (which is only tangentially related to Haley’s over-arching narrative of a sophisticated robot astronaut navigating unknown galaxies, war-torn planets, and romantic heartbreak).
