A former San Diegan, ambient psydub producer Bluetech’s signature underwater mid/downtempo dubscapes intertwine the digital and the organic with exotic, live instrumentation sampled over contemplative bass and crystalline, ‘verbed out bleeps and bloops. A full-length called Rainforest Reverberation was released on the Critical Beats label in 2011.
His sound has been described as PsyDM (psytelligent dance music), spacehop, temple-step, and conscious womp, and it echoes the story of the Shuar people in the Ecuadorian jungle, where Amazon Voice is delivering laptops, video cameras, and audio cards to indigenous communities in order to connect them with each other and the outside world.
The independent media centers allow the Shuar and other communities to help protect the Amazon by monitoring flora and fauna; alert officials to illegal mining, logging, and ranching; share their knowledge of forestry, medicine, and sustainable cultivation; and document and archive their culture.
From the Amazon Voice website: “Upon meetings organized by COICA with the nine Presidents of the indigenous organizations of the nine nations of the Amazon region, it was clear that not only are the indigenous peoples experiencing severe cultural loss, but human rights are also consistently violated due to lack of communications capabilities between indigenous peoples and their representative leaders, as well as the international public.”
“It’s very Western, the idea of, pardon the term, the ‘white man savior’, that ‘we’re going to bring in our technology, we’re going to bring in our resources, we’re going to fix everything, we’re going to make everything better,’ and often that world view takes the pieces it wants from a culture and ignores the pieces it doesn’t want,” Bluetech (aka Evan Bartholomew/Marc) said in a recent interview with the LIB Citizen.
“The distinction with the Amazon Voice project is it enables communities to document their culture in their way, and that’s why it really appeals to me. The fundraising work and the activism work we’re doing is about building technology centers, media centers in the Amazon that allow communities to document the way they relate to their environment. And the endemic species, the cultural relationships, all that stuff – it gives them the power to speak their own voice instead of being filtered through the Western anthropological ‘Noble Savage’ viewpoint.”
As of 2012, Bluetech lived in Portland, Oregon, but he reportedly returned to San Diego.