What does a monolith dream of? The question, like the album it titles, is both playful and profound - a conceptual Rubik’s cube wrapped in electric haze and polished with cinematic nostalgia. Teleport Collective’s "A Monolith’s Dream" is a record that straddles the thresholds of past and future, utopia and ruin, with an audacity as crystalline as it is chaotic.

The Vienna-based trio - Aaron Maria Steiner (keys, sampling, lights), Michael Naphegyi (drums, toys, electronics), and Joachim Huber (bass, tiny machines) - crafts what they call "electrified jazz". But this moniker feels insufficient for the labyrinth of moods, genres, and futurescapes mapped across the album’s two halves. Imagine Sun Ra’s Arkestra docking with Kraftwerk in a biomechanical utopia where Philip K. Dick pens the liner notes.

The album’s first picture is a wistful celebration of a posthuman world, where humanity’s obsolescence hums with pastel nostalgia. Tracks like “A Monolith’s Dream” and “Skeleton Dance” blend retro sci-fi synths with lo-fi grooves, evoking the grainy charm of forgotten VHS tapes of tomorrow. There’s a sly kitschiness here, but it’s wielded with intention, as if the monolith has been watching too many Kubrick films and taken up DJing. The standout, “Earth Tape”, layers celestial arpeggios over languid rhythms, while “Dawn” closes the chapter in a luminous exhale, as if heralding a sunrise no human eyes will ever see.

But the dream turns nightmare in the album’s second half. “Mother Engine” and “Red Steam” dive into a dystopian soundscape of mechanical throbs and industrial despair, a claustrophobic meditation on humanity’s self-destructive inertia. The improvisational approach shines here, imbuing the album with an unpredictability that mirrors its thematic descent into chaos. By the time we reach the 16-second dirge of “Doom”, it’s not just the monolith dreaming - it’s humanity, startled awake, gasping in the wreckage.

Teleport Collective’s roots in Vienna’s underground are evident in their fearless experimentation. Known for their live alchemy of composition, improvisation, and raw sonic play, the trio distills these elements into a studio creation that feels alive, pulsing with urgency and mischief. It’s worth noting their former incarnation as Killah Tofu - a name that hints at their irreverent ethos, which persists even in the face of grand, speculative themes.

The production here is pristine yet textured, as though engineered to sound both archaic and futuristic. Steiner’s synth work alternates between luminous and menacing, Naphegyi’s drum machines glitch like a malfunctioning assembly line, and Huber’s bass burbles with the mechanical soul of forgotten engines.

Ironically, for a record about humanity’s vanishing relevance, "A Monolith’s Dream" pulsates with deeply human qualities: irony, nostalgia, wonder, and dread. It’s a warning, an elegy, and a celebration all at once - music that feels like peering into the rearview mirror of a spaceship as Earth fades into memory.

Essential for: fans of experimental jazz, retrofuturistic soundtracks, and anyone seeking the perfect soundtrack for dreaming of dystopias.