I’ve been hearing early mixes of the first songs from this project from more than two years back, so I’ve been anxious to finally share it with everyone. I’ve always been a fan of both Touch and DJ Matto, and together they have each outdone themselves. And I love the subject matter! Give the album a chance, especially if you’re fans of sci-fi, and specifically Blade Runner.

01 – Electric Sheep
02 – Black Label
03 – Dystopia
04 – The Chinese Room
05 – Expand
06 – Rachel Rosen (ft. Yolanda Sargeant)
07 – Voight Kampff
08 – I Kill U (ft. Timbuktu & Chokeules)
09 – Soldier
10 – The Last Engineer
11 – Live in Fear
12 – Tears

Lyrics written and performed by Touch, except: 
Hooks on “Rachel Rosen” by Yolanda Sargeant 
Additional vocals on “I Kill You” by Timbuktu and Chokeules 
Production and cuts by DJ Matto

Mixed and mastered by DJ Matto 
Artwork by Damn Selene 
Original art design concept by Touch 

With his new album, Electric Sheep, Touch explores artificial intelligence, cyberpunk, futurism, and humanity as a social animal. Continuing his collaborations with a single producer, the Edmonton MC is joined by DJ Matto, previously of Vancouver, BC, horrorcore rap duo Hidden Fortress and currently holding down multiple MCs as DJ and producer in Fukuoka, Japan. DJ Matto’s crisp mix of heavy drums, deep bass, and haunting synth sound as if the music is emanating from an off-world colony and beamed directly into your mind, while the choruses consist primarily of his consummate cuts, a constant reminder that the album is also an exploration of hip hop. 

After a nostalgic re-watching of Blade Runner followed by a journey down the YouTube rabbit hole that ended with a lecture by John Searle on his famous Chinese Room experiment, Touch realized Searle’s experiment was almost identical to the Voight Kampff test used by the authorities in Blade Runner to identify a replicant from a human. Cue the epiphany: Ridley Scott’s movie isn’t about the protagonist, blade runner Rick Deckard, but is rather the story of the antagonist, replicant Roy Batty, and his impossible-to-contemplate self-awareness. Touch delves into the source material—Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the Blade Runner series, and the other movies peripheral to that universe, such as Soldier, Total Recall, and the Alien movies—to tell this story from the perspective of many different characters. “Soldier”, the rapid-fire first single, is the story of genetically-modified humans bred for war; the title track paints an uncomfortable picture of life on the run as a robotic slave, told by Roy Batty; “Rachel Rosen” explores the Rick Deckard of the novel in a twisted tale of love and robots featuring Yolanda Sargeant (of Sargeant X Comrade) as the titular love interest; and the aggressive posse cut “I Kill You” has Swamp Thing’s Timbuktu and Chokeules joining Touch to run through a number of classic death scenes from these movies. 

It begins with beats, bars and cuts, but Touch’s detailed character studies and his nuanced story further enable the listener to explore as far as their imagination will take them… into the dystopian universe of Electric Sheep!