EXCERPT Provoked by the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, Brexit, and the pandemic, Astro-Darien is a 26-minute sonic fiction about the break-up of Britain, narrated by synthetic Scottish voices and framed as an eponymous videogame. It is the second release on Hyperdub’s sub-label Flatlines, and features artwork by my long-time collaborators Lawrence Lek and Optigram. Whereas the first release on the label, Mark Fisher and Justin Barton’s On Vanishing Land, wove an audio essay around a walk along the south-east coast of England, Astro-Darien takes off from a road trip along the north coast of Scotland. The documentary fiction spirals between the role played in the founding of the UK by the catastrophic Darien Scheme in the late seventeenth century, when Scotland failed to colonise part of present-day Panama, and the contemporary disintegration of the union. The Darien scheme almost bankrupted an already impoverished Scotland and led to its having to enter into union with England. So the time spiral, moving simultaneously forward and back in time, with the present at its apex, sweeps up both the inception and prospective demise of the union. From a Caledonian heart of darkness to a supernova Scotia?…