Discovery Zone, is the project of JJ Weihl. The multi-artist recently announced her new album, Quantum Web, will drop on March 8, 2024 via RVNG Intl (Holly Herndon, Helado Negro). Discovery Zone’s Quantum Web will be released in LP, Japanese import CD, and digital editions. A portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit Doctors Without Borders, who provide independent, impartial medical humanitarian assistance to people affected by conflict, disease outbreaks, natural and human-made disasters, and exclusion from health care in more than seventy countries.

Along with the news, Discovery Zone has shared lead-single “Mall of Luv.” The electronic producer utilizes her equipment’s presets to explore the melancholic nuances of our modern world. The music acts as a constant dialogue between organic and virtual realms, speaking a universal language that resonates with listeners on a deeply familiar level.

Moving to Berlin from her native New York City in the early 2010s, the songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist developed her musical practice over four albums as a member of the beloved art rock band Fenster before introducing Discovery Zone with Remote Control in 2020. JJ named Discovery Zone after the chain of indoor, youth oriented entertainment facilities filled with mazes and climbing structures that shuttered shortly after the turn of the millennium — a space born of commercialism that she describes as a “glorified cage” which nonetheless offered her, and millions of other children, the freedom to explore. The music of Discovery Zone plays with a perception of inevitable corporate societal control, but finds its own power and liberation in sounds that obscure their institutional sources.

Inspired by the omnipresence of advertising and corporate culture as much as the potential of cybernetics and neural networks, Discovery Zone plunges into an uncanny valley with Quantum Web, where the distinctions between the earnest and the ironic blur in tandem with the border between the human and the post-human. JJ wrote a number of Quantum Web’s songs for Cybernetica, a multimedia performance she was commissioned in 2021. Cataloging her daily activities as data points to be analyzed, she broke her life down into statistics and presented them onstage to a live audience, depersonalizing her experience while claiming it for herself in all its mundane yet intimate detail. Quantum Web casts JJ in a concordant role: a pop star mediated by machines, just as willing to sink anonymously into her productions as she is to shine as their legible central figure.

Working with producer E.T., JJ dips into a pool of decades-spanning style, finding room for 80s sophisti-pop, modern hyper-digital bubblegum, and early electro. Flights of motorik momentum animate more bustling compositions while shades of downtempo and city pop dim the lights over more subdued moments. An otherwise electronic arrangement might suddenly host a crystalline guitar riff or a bumping electric bassline, calling back to JJ’s musical upbringing playing guitar and bass as a teen on through her decade spent in a more traditional “rock band” setting. Interspersed among the pieces of Quantum Web that code as some permutation of electronic pop songwriting, a series of minute-long interludes turns the dial toward lush textural sculpting and pure ambient drift — regularly scheduled programming punctuated by commercial breaks.

Discovery Zone
Quantum Web
RVNG Intl

1. Supernatural
2. Pair A Dice
3. Ur Eyes
4. FYI
5. Qubit Lite
6. Test
7. Out
8. Operating System
9. Mall Of Luv
9. Kite
10. All Dressed Up With Nowhere to Go
11. Undressed
12. Qubit QT
13. Keep It
14. Lite
15. Xrystal

Discovery Zone 2024 North American Tour Dates

03/21/24 – San Francisco, CA @ Kilowatt
03/22/24 – Los Angeles, CA @ Zebulon
03/28/24 – Chicago, IL @ Schubas
03/29/24 – Toronto, ON @ Baby G
03/30/24 – Montreal, QC @ Bar Le Ritz
04/03/24 – Brooklyn NY @ TV Eye

order tickets for Discovery Zone HERE