Switched on Pop - How a sci-fi dystopia became a personal utopia (ft. Arc Iris)

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

A sci-fi ballet imagined a 2080 where AI strips people of purpose, and the day before its New York premiere, an actual dystopia arrived. Arc Iris, the trio of Jocie Adams, Zach Tenorio and Ray Belli, built iTMRW as a concept record set in a future ruled by a mega-corporation that shares its name. In its world, AI has taken most jobs and even the thinking left inside them, so the corporation offers pods where anyone can live any dream in virtual reality. The piece premiered in Cambridge in January 2020, then its New York show collapsed the day before the lockdown. What follows is the story of a project that outlasted its own premise. When venues closed, they left Providence for Los Angeles, rebuilt a dilapidated house, spent eight months in a 120-square-foot shed, and constructed their own studio and stage. The dystopia they wrote became, in their telling, a personal utopia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save. Right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Every week, Switched on Pop opens with a wind-up of tape loops, layers of vocals, and some very funky moog synthesizers. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. That is our show's Sonic Identity that we documented on episode 401.

We called it the biggest theme song fail. We gave our very outdated theme a little glow-up with the help of musicians, Jossie Adams and Zach Tenario. Jossi and Zach, alongside drummer Ray Belli, are in a band together called Ark Iris. They've been around as a group pretty much as long as we've been a podcast. They're genuinely some of the most talented musicians I've ever known and are a deep source of inspiration to me. Since you hear them every week on the show, I wanted to give you a chance to get to know Jossi and Zach through some of their music. Music that has helped me find a sense of hope to combat these dystopian times.

I hope you'll feel the same. Can we just start by, can I ask who are you? My name is Zach Tenorio and I play keyboards with Ark Iris. My name is Jossie Adams and I play bits and bobs and I sing and arrange and write for Ark Iris. And we make pretty wild music? Yeah. You have a project coming out called I Tomorrow that has been long in the works. What is I Tomorrow?

I Tomorrow is a hopeful yet quite dystopian futuristic concept record. It started as a performance art piece. In 2020, we've had a performance of the performance art piece, or maybe I should call it a, what do we call it? A sci-fi ballet. A sci-fi ballet. A sci-fi ballet. All the little pinkies come out and they walk to right left.

Right, right. I Tomorrow is the name of the record, but it's also the name of the mega corporation that basically rules the world in 2080. I tomorrow, we today. We start with a sort of dystopium broadcast jingle. Followed by like a pleasant music bed to an advertisement. It's 2080, go and worry that. A virtual ration is going for you. Free of church.

But there's something a little discordant about it. A little sinister. And a narration, we are introduced into a sci-fi world. What the heck is going on in the world of I-Tamorow? That's just to give a shout-out. That's our friend Noah Harley, who plays the voice of Lucian Greg, who is the, we call him the face of I-Tomorrow. He's like the spokesman for I-Tomorrow.

And then that's also our friend Willow, Willow Smith, who is the voice of the, of virtual ration. Where does this future world lead us? Well, the story of Itamaro takes place in 2080, and there's our every man, Robert, and in this first track, virtual rations, a lot of us are out of jobs, so we don't really have a purpose. And if we do have a job, many of the most interesting aspects of our job are taken by AI. And a lot of the thinking that we would be doing is stolen by AI. And so the solution that this giant corporation comes up with

is that they create a bunch of AI-driven pods that supposedly enrich our lives. And here in the song, we see Robert making his daily visit to the virtual rations pod where one can dream any dream and live said dream through virtual reality.

Everything looks pretty and here I got ladies doing their side trip in the raw. She's done. Disconnecting from. And so you make this sci-fi ballet. You're putting on these performances. And then what happens? So we did two shows at Oberon and Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was January of 2020.

So you know what happens next. Boom, bum, bum. Global pandemic happens. Yeah, exactly. And we were all set to do a New York premiere of the show at Le Pussain Rouge. And, yeah. Basically the day before that show, that was when, like, the full mass lockdown happened. So the show died and the spirit of I Tomorrow was lost.

For a while. Yeah. At this moment, your life also gets entirely upended. As so many people's did, you made a move from Providence, Rhode Island to Los Angeles. What happened in the in-between between I-Tomorrow being shut down and you, putting it out, you know, five, six years later. First, a period of mourning and depression and confusion, as many musicians such as ourselves went through. And hope. We had a lot of hope that things were going to open back up and we were going to be able to do it.

And I think it was August. It was pretty clear that we were going to just pick up our stuff and travel across the country and kind of start a new life. It started with there was a house. that was completely dilapidated that we basically brought back to life. And while we were working on it, Jossie and I lived in 120 square foot shed for like kind of way too long for like eight months. With our cats. With our cats and our synthesizers. And we didn't really have much as far as, you know, plumbing.

We didn't have a kitchen. So we cooked everything on a propane grill. and yeah, we pooped in buckets for kind of a while, which is honestly, man, underrated. Having visited you in this time, I will say that you were also, you were living on this beautiful piece of land that you were rehabilitating, and it wasn't just this, you were also building this studio, and you were building a stage, a whole place to perform,

sort of your own musical reality, if the venues that you wanted to play at were shut down, you basically built your own venue. It was a very romantic, time. Like when we finally finished working on our house Jossie almost started crying because she didn't want to move out of the shed.

It was a really, really difficult time. But coming out the other side, I think there was a lot about the gift of time that became positive. I mean, personally, a few positives happened, perhaps? Oh, yeah, we also got married. We got married. We had a kid. We started a concert series called Glass Hill, and we've hosted almost 40 of those shows. We've hosted artists

like Reggie Watts and Willow and Liv and Luke Temple and Kimbra and basically all of our favorite artists we've somehow managed to convince to play in our backyard. So you made a musical work about a future dystopia. That show was disrupted by a real dystopia. Yes. There's a song on I Tomorrow that I feel like actually reflects what was going on for you. A little, I mean, that exact meaning of that song is that the ocean's coming in, and it's literally eating away the shoreline and, you know, taking Providence into the ocean. But yes, also goodbye Providence. Hello, L.A. Exactly.

And, you know, let's just recap. Mary, child, concerts, studio, this beautiful land that you've made. And finally, in a moment where perhaps our fears that could be realized in night tomorrow are most present, this work is finally arriving into the world. How does that feel? It is such a glorious feeling that this music is finally coming out, Because honestly, seven years later, it still feels fresh. It still feels good.

And maybe because the meaning of all the songs is constantly shifting and replugging itself into our current reality. Very excited that is coming out. It's a, yeah, long time coming. Is there a song on It Tomorrow that you feel like represents this moment for you that we could go out on? I mean, I would say that Dreamer of Dreams is really special in that I wrote the string arrangements and conducted the string players and sang it like one or two weeks away from giving birth. That also gave that piece a whole new life and a meaningfulness that it won't ever be without.

Is it with these things I hear the melodies you smile? I'll cheers my dog. Or is it just another song that's built for me to sing along to eyes? Why do you smell like daylight? Then you gave birth, and pretty quickly you were back in the studio. I can see the moment. I was literally carrying Asie in the recording studio. I was holding him with one hand breastfeeding, conducting with the other hand.

and the tenderness of the feeling. And actually in the singing of that song, you can hear that my vocal chords are like a little bit heavier and more swollen from my pregnancy. When I look from me to you, is it me about whom that I'm dream? I sort of feel like you turned I tomorrow a sci-fi future kind of dystopia into your own personal utopia.

Yeah, the amount of work that we put in and the amount of satisfaction and beauty and communication of idea and feeling like Ark Iris was truly heard and seen for the first time in a lot of ways, I love that. I think that's right. In that way, I think that is very much true. This whole time, you've been listening to I Tomorrow by Arkis. The underscoring included, all of it comes from I Tomorrow. It's a beautiful album. Go check it out. I know you're going to love it.

We'll be back again on Tuesday with more Switched on Pop. And until then, thanks for listening. Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance.

Get paid back up to 90% of vet bills. You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save.