Cybernation

Cybernation was the recording name of Winnipeg musician James Rewucki, and The Dark Plane was his first album. He was 21 when he made it in 1987, working alone in his home studio over about a month and playing every instrument himself. He meant it as an experiment, a test of whether a home setup could produce a respectable record, and he was still teaching himself to write songs and to sing.

His rig centred on an Akai MG1214, a 12-track recorder and mixer that ran half-inch tape in its own cassette format, along with an Akai sampler, a Korg DW-8000 synthesizer, a sequencer, guitars, bass and outboard effects. With the multitracks finished, he took the tapes to Century 21 Studios in Winnipeg, where the whole album was mixed and mastered to two-track analog tape in one four-hour session. The sleeve records it as remixed there in December 1987, and the LP went out privately with Rewucki's Larchdale Crescent address printed on the back.

The Dark Plane moves between progressive rock, synthesizer-based electronics and ambient passages. Rewucki later named Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno as his main influences at the time.

The songs follow a single journey. 'Silence', nine minutes long, leaves Earth behind, and the instrumental 'Zero Gravity' drifts into open space. 'Hologram' bends reality, and 'Listen for the Aliens' ends with the traveller taken prisoner. After the instrumental 'Alien Grid', “Abduction” finds the narrator locked in an alien cell. 'Escape', another instrumental, breaks him out, 'Drifting' leaves him alone as time runs down, and the two-part 'Finale' carries him through 'Re-entry' to 'Home Streams'.

Rewucki went on to record electronic music as Dead Air Animal and to front the Winnipeg band Dr. Rage and the Uppercuts, and he built Absurd Machine into a film and music production company. As a director he made the horror features Aegri Somnia (2008) and Tempus Tormentum (2018), with Dead Air Animal contributing music to both, carrying on the synthesizer work he began on The Dark Plane. He now writes and produces music as Frater Seamus and the Church of the Absurd.

Absurd Machine counts The Dark Plane as its first release. Once the original pressing had sold out, Rewucki went back to the original analog multitracks and remixed and remastered the album for a limited vinyl reissue. He could not raise the money to press it, and the offers he had from independent distributors were not to his liking, so the remastered Dark Plane remains unreleased.

-Robert Williston, approved by James Rewucki, Oct 4, 2026