Mankind Is The Program (Other Side)

Mankind Is The Program has its own musical prehistory. Work on it began after Underworld — Pearls Girl (All Out Remix). That kind of continuity is not unusual for All Out: one finished piece often leaves behind an impulse that begins to grow into the next. In this case, that next line of work was already underway by the summer of 2021, long before the official release. Surviving material shows several early versions, while the first public demo appeared in December of that year.

That is why it would be too simple to say that Mankind Is The Program was born out of the events of 2022. The music already existed. But by the time the single was released on 10 August 2022, the world in which it was being finished — and heard by its author — had changed. War, anxiety and political tension could no longer be cleanly separated from everyday life, or from the person who was still making music inside it. The material did not come from one single event, but those circumstances gave an existing piece a different weight.

That is also where the title becomes important.

For All Out, Mankind Is The Program is about a contradiction in human behaviour: people see themselves as creators of systems, rules and programmes, yet repeatedly reproduce familiar patterns as if they were executing code already written for them. States, generations, technologies and justifications change, while war, violence, repression and the destruction of what once seemed stable keep returning. Humanity programmes the world around it — and at the same time becomes part of the programme.

That idea became clearer in retrospect. No extended author statement from 2021–2022 has survived with this exact explanation of the title, but this is how All Out now describes the thought behind it.

Over time, the original became more than just another single for its author. All Out sees Mankind Is The Program as one of his calling cards and as an important step in the development of the project’s musical language. It already differed from the two preceding works in its approach to sound and structure, and the process of making it remained interesting enough that the desire to return to the material did not disappear after release.

And the project was not simply closed and forgotten after August 2022. It was revisited again that autumn; a separate VIP branch appeared in 2023; the original continued to live inside All Out’s DJ programmes; and by the end of that year, the line that would eventually become Other Side had begun to take shape. Several intermediate versions followed through 2024, with the most intensive period of work arriving in September, directly before the 28 September release.

For this kind of self-reworking, All Out sometimes uses the tag (Other Side). In practice it is close to remixing one’s own track, but the phrase itself is more appealing to the author because it leaves more room for interpretation: it does not have to mean only a new arrangement or a technical alternate version, but another side of material that is already familiar.

With Mankind Is The Program, that difference became musical rather than merely conceptual. As Other Side developed, several intermediate versions appeared; by the end, the tempo had been slowed, the overall movement had become more drawn-out, and the mastering was markedly different. Familiar fragments remained, but their timbre, construction and role inside the composition changed. The archive also confirms the same project foundation alongside newly added rhythmic material: this is neither a remaster of the original nor a track rebuilt from scratch, but a substantial reworking of the same material.

And despite the weight of the surrounding context, returning to this music was not itself a burden. On the contrary, All Out enjoyed working on the original, and returning to it later was enjoyable as well. That creates an important tension in the story of Other Side: music connected to a very difficult period could still remain a space for curiosity, exploration and pleasure in the process itself.

By 2024, however, the person opening that material again was in a different state.

In the release post, All Out spoke directly about anger, hatred, the feeling of a “zombified society”, and a war of conquest. By then, war had long ceased to feel like a separate event outside ordinary life: anxiety, a sense of insecurity, restrictions and censorship had become a constant background. At the same time, the author does not reduce Other Side to a simple causal formula. Similar music might have appeared under different circumstances. But in reality, it appeared in these.

That is why the heavy breakbeat, deep bass and tense movement of Other Side do not need to be translated literally into a code where every sound stands for a specific event or emotion. The music was not made that way. For All Out, it is a process of emotion and design at the same time: some decisions are planned, some emerge during the work, some overturn the original plan, while life remains present somewhere beside the process throughout.

The context is not there to explain the music instead of the music. It simply offers another key to how it can be heard.

And in the history of this particular piece, there is an almost unexpected rhyme with the title itself. The project returns to the same foundation again and again, changing and running in a new form, while the world around it continues to reproduce many of the same human patterns that Mankind Is The Program is concerned with. It would be misleading to present that as an artistic device deliberately planned back in 2021. But in retrospect, the coincidence is too precise to ignore completely.

The original version continued to live separately throughout this period. All Out included it in both his own and guest DJ programmes; it closed one of the guest mixes prepared for Linda B, and later appeared in Funky Flavor and Sound System Aberration. So the return to the project did not happen after two years of silence — the music remained part of All Out’s own musical space throughout.

In September 2024, that long line finally reached another completed point.

Other Side does not correct or replace the original. It is the same material carried through a different period, a different state of mind, and a new stage of work with sound. And for All Out himself, it is another side of a track he is genuinely proud of.