Analogue Appreciation: Powerplant

‘Heat’, the opening track from Powerplant’s recent eponymous EP, opens with an all-systems go, rolling guitar riff. In its music video, the band’s lead Theo Zhykharyev, moves around football fields and urban farm animal enclosures playing the guitar while his washed-out vocals top the soundtrack, with a pig even taking a friendly nibble of one of its tuning pegs.

It’s one of the synth-punk band’s more accessible tracks, having released headsy dungeon punk and an experimental rock record (2023’s Grass) since their 2019 debut. While the music takes different sonic turns between records, the main unifying quality of music is a tight embrace of experimenting and never staying still.

At one point during ​‘Heat’s’ music video, Theo holds up a pack of Magic: The Gathering cards – the first trading card game of the modern era. Flitting between fuzzy, Y2K camcorder quality video and more clean-cut shots, the visualiser is a fun, nostalgic throwback to a pre-smartphone world. To learn more about what he keeps in his home, we asked Theo to pick out five of his favourite pieces of physical culture for our Analogue Appreciation series. See his picks below.

• Read next: Analogue Appreciation: For Those I Love

You need to multiply and propagate your plants until their maintenance doubles your water bill, and you sink what’s left on bigger terracottas because your saplings need to grow. I love them all. They just grow if you let them. It reminds me how the world works. This is as un-online as it gets.

When the lights go out and you need to participate in a financial exchange, you need to get your eight dollar bills out and get a little something from the vendor. Plastic money is borderline AI and it’s the devil. I got my eight bills and I’m ready 24/7. There is simply only one way to make it rain at Jumbo’s Clown Room [a bikini bar in Los Angeles], and brother, you ain’t tapping your way out of this one, pal.

Something about moving little cardboard characters around the table with, hopefully, three other friends of yours feels like a big win against the screen time counter going up. Some of these cards are older than I am. Old art looks so much fun. And it’s just nice to participate in a hobby. Hobbies are so strange and so nice. It’s an activity that doesn’t really provide any professional gain; you just do something because you enjoy it? Crazy.

Summer is almost over – it’s time to go back to school. Time to sit down and listen to the meister. Learn from the best, learn from 50 Cent. More than anything it’s just very funny to learn about my favourite rapper’s life this way. This might be a silly assumption, but I do feel like he probably wrote this himself and this makes it so much more awesome. The fact that this exists reminds me of how beautiful this word can be.

I don’t understand why it’s called a ​“Trinket folder”, because it’s just paper memorabilia and the trinkets I keep elsewhere, but perhaps this is another great mystery of the world and will go on unquestioned. It’s nice to have little fragments of your past locked away and safe, undigitised, unbacked up, just fuel for the fire ready to go. It’s good to reflect, to look back, see where it all went wrong.

Heat by Powerplant is out now on Arcane Dynamics.

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