Since 1998, Retconned’s dry synthetic sneer and total disinterest in the art-less mimicry of so-called punks has been misunderstood as a gimmick and saddled with inappropriate labels like “art rock,” “performance art” and “experimental.” There is nothing artful about the momentary absolutism of a Retconned performance and nothing experimental about turning up the distortion. Retconned writes songs about people trying to get by. You might have missed the back story: Retconned, a.k.a. Jonathan Lukens, a young ATL punk prone to introversion and foul luck, fits of rock n’ roll neurasthenia, odd haircuts, and odd diatribe finds himself sole survivor in the reverse Horatio Alger world of house shows and D.I.Y. make-good. Hijinx ensue and folks bicker and flee.

Poisoned by fallout, Lukens begins working with sampler and sequencer. While he has no real love for the electronic music of the time, band members are hard to come by, and the sounds he’s looking to produce have no real analogs in the world of guitar, bass, and drums. Lukens names this new band Retconned, jargon for retroactive continuity. Shows were played. Towns were fled in haste. In 1999, Stickfigure Records released Simulant Skin Included, Retconned’s debut full-length, which drew comparisons to Chrome, Men’s Recovery Project, Mars and Throbbing Gristle. Later that year, Retconned relocated to New York City and began to hone his production skills. Facilitated by his involvement with NYC new wave band Amverts and the Kraut rock and dubinspired post-rock trio Ultivac, he cultivated a more traditional approach to the craft of songwriting and a new disrespect for traditional ideas of tonality.

In 2002, Retconned released Game Sounds, a beautifully catchy pop album that combined a post-punk aesthetic, elements of eighties synth pop and electro, and highly dissonant synthetic textures. With Game Sounds, Retconned aimed to do for the National Reconaisance Office what The Village People did for the Navy. The soundtrack to a false choice between privacy and security should be something you can bob your head to.

Now, having abandoned the dissonant “minimalism about militarism” schtick of Game Sounds, Retconned seems a lot less crazed, and a little more soulful. Forgoing the down-sampled aesthetic of previous releases for fat, layered synths with tube-fried tones, Unhappenings focuses less on Cold War logic and post-9/11 battlefronts and more on pluralist blues. Retconned thinks this record sounds a little like a few of his pop favorites: The Idiot, Sound in Time, Replicas, Closer. Is all what it seems? Will Retconned learn to talk dirty and influence people? Will Dick ever get down with Jane on Search for Tomorrow? Will anyone be able to diagram the uneven distribution of reputation capital? Will teenage goth boys like it? Will people continue to compare Retconned to bands he has never heard of?

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