Layers

LAYERS is the first full-length album by OVERANDOVERANDOVER, the solo project of Toni V., Rome-based guitarist, cellist and laptop/synth wiggler in the experimental art-rock band vonneumann, here proposing his multi-stylistic, conceptual approach to experimental electronic music.

LAYERS’ core inspiration is drawn from the 2015 socio-philosophical treatise “The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty”, by Benjamin Bratton.

The book envisions a planetary-scale “accidental megastructure”, called The Stack, where various forms of contemporary computation — such as cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, etc. — participate to an interconnected computational apparatus, fundamentally reshaping, in Bratton’s view, global geopolitics and sovereignty.

The Stack is conceived as a layered architecture comprising a number of interconnected components. Mirroring this conceptual model, LAYERS is structured into four distinct parts, each directly corresponding to a specific layer of The Stack, serving as a thematic and inspirational catalyst.

Crucially, LAYERS intentionally diverges from Bratton’s broad geopolitical focus, opting instead for a radically subjective perspective. This division into layers then becomes a methodological framework to channel personal reflections and obsessions, which broadly encompass technology, architecture, identity, video games, and isometric illustration. Moreover, LAYERS explores a diverse range of electronic music styles while maintaining a certain level of stylistic and conceptual coherence.

The four parts of LAYERS were conceived and produced independently over a period of 4 years, through which the world’s global geopolitical and technological scenario radically retracted from the vision of seamless ultraglobalization originally posited by Bratton in 2015.

As the production unfolded, this mutated narrative reflected directly into the music and in its psychological core, transitioning from merely speculative to embodying a tension between the gloomy and the utopian — a process of reactive evolution directly echoing the concept of accidental design, which forms the basis of The Stack itself.