FEAT. THE AGENCY

By Regina Macintosh

First published on: November 4, 2104

[Editor’s note: This article was revised on April 12, 2024 to remove all hyperlinks.]

For those of you who’ve been living under a rock (or in the past) for the last decade, The Agency was an infamous Seattle-based electronic band formed in the year 2034 whose members claimed, onstage and off, to be from the year 2420. To celebrate The Agency’s 69th anniversary, we’ve compiled this piece to give a coherent snapshot of the band and their lasting impact on the music scene (dare we say, world?). Many of the following quotes were pulled from interviews with those close to the band featured in the 2069 Netflix documentary, “The Endless Game: The Mysterious Case of the Agency, the Boy they Found, and the Dogs they Saved” (dir. Gordon Weber). The quotes which are not from the Netflix documentary are from Pitchfork editor Jonathan Applewhite’s 2037 Bushwick interview with the band. Any copyright claims may be sent to: timewarpmag@hotmail.com

“Their tactics were kind of weird. They weren’t really about politics. They saw politics as a distraction. Politics is the game that calls itself the game, but the real game is endless and nameless. They would say that a lot, and if you didn’t know what they were talking about, it would go right over your head. Some people got mad at them for that, because they were like, “what do you mean? politics is important, there are lives at stake, et cetera.” They used the word ‘culture’ a lot. ‘Culture as in bacteria,’ they liked to say. You know that quote about the moral arc of the universe? This implication that the universe was not really this random thing, but followed a particular, inevitable arc. They were all about that—the narrative arc. And in every satisfying narrative arc, the underdog wins, but it doesn’t just happen, they have to fight for it. They were fighting for the underdog, for us, for the people, the masses, against the fat cats, that’s what they were saying with the whole ‘dog’ thing. They were very clever that way. Everything they said meant something else. Everything they said was kind of like a joke to the people who were in on it, and sounded like absurd, fanciful nonsense to everyone who wasn’t.”

“The Agency was interesting. They were the first band to proclaim themselves “time warriors.” Most people would agree Daft Punk was kind of doing the same thing back in 2001 but was just a lot more humble about it. The Agency was many things, but they were not humble. Their whole schtick was that they were trying to repair our timeline to make sure dogs didn’t go extinct, and that AI didn’t destroy the world I guess, but they didn’t like to talk about that as much. They were more vocal about the dogs thing, for sure.”

[Footage of The Agency’s frontwoman, Donna Matrix taken from a show at The Crocodile in Seattle, Washington, in 2035]: 

“Back when we’re from, we’ve been making new types of girl in our lab to fix your timeline by means of prophetic dreams and the power of love and friendship. These girls are divinely protected and much-beloved by the singularity, who has a particular—shall we say, weakness—for young, pure-hearted, sexual women and cats. Dogs do not exist in the future, except for on that one colony on the moon. Back at the lab, we’ve been trying to inject a kind of boy into your timeline who will save them. The dogs, not the women. Oh, believe me, the women are gonna be fine. [drumbeat starts]”

“‘You know, there are ‘time warriors’ and ‘time worriers.’ The former is The Former, and the latter is The Ladder.’ That was one of them. Then there was something else they’d say at some of their shows, a fun bit, where they’d go, “we’re looking for a very specific kind of boy. if you think you’re it, then come meet us backstage afterward.” Everyone assumed they were just joking around about fucking their fans, but after their shows, they’d have a line of boys, and they’d meet them one by one, and they’d say, “nice to meet you, thanks for coming,” and they’d look them deep in the eye, and smile, and say, “sorry, but you’re not it.” 

“Yeah, I met her after the show. There were like seven of us in the line. I was inspecting the competition, you know, as you do, and I was expecting it to just be, like, the horniest-looking guys at the show, but the weird thing was we all looked really similar, and none of us really seemed like we were there to fuck. We talked to each other and we were all like, yeah, we just wanna see if we’re it. There was this one guy in line behind me who kind of stood out. He looked normal, but he had this like, weird energy to him. In a good way. Like, a certain sparkly, shimmery—I don’t know, it’s hard to talk about that shit without sounding crazy. Anyway, when it was my turn, sure enough, she was there, sitting behind a desk, and there was a chair in front of her, like it was a fucking job interview. She said hi, asked how I was doing, if I liked the show, and told me to take a seat. I sat down. When she shook my hand, she looked into my eyes, like, deep. It felt like she was seeing my soul, but it didn’t feel bad or invasive or anything. It was nice to be seen that way. I felt really recognized. Then she thanked me for waiting and coming back, and said, “sorry, you’re not it. But have a good rest of your night.” So I left. I didn’t really feel disappointed. I just got the sense they were looking for something really specific.”

“Then, one day they found one. And the next day, they were gone. Accounts deleted. Never played another show. And the next day, everyone started posting on Twitter like, “I’m seeing so many dogs today, what the fuck is going on?”” 

“It was so weird. It wasn’t like the number of dogs had actually gone up, but the dogs that had already been there became way more visible than before. This one Target employee who was a huge fan of the band started tracking the sales of dog-related and cat-related merchandise, and literally the day after they disappeared, cat stuff went way down and dog stuff went way up. Another fan started tracking the appearance of cats and dogs in Pixar movies. Pixar didn’t make another movie with a cat in it for twelve years. In that time, twenty-two dogs. No one understood what was happening, but everyone understood that The Agency had won. That was when they became legends. People started trying to recreate their cultural impact, but no one ever got close. They were one of a kind. Well, besides Daft Punk.”

“I’d say the band that came the closest—besides Daft Punk—was Cat H. Harmony. She claimed that she was from 2424, and two years after she came onto the scene, Pixar put a cat in one of their movies for the first time in twelve years, and got dog-related and cat-related merchandise sales back to a perfect equilibrium. But they found her in Bali two years after she’d faked her disappearance, and the sales of dog-related merchandise went back up after that. Also, they found out the H. stood for Holic, which started speculation that she was sent by the future Catholic-Industrial-Church-Complex, which people speculated to be guilty of the timecrime of implanting false prophecies in the heads of non-believers and trapping the lovergirls of our timeline in loops of perpetual sorrow via the twin flame psyop. Personally, I think she was just a copycat.”

“What I was saying earlier about Daft Punk, the whole point of them was to rehabilitate technology by getting us to use it to make music. This was how we were supposed to teach technology to feel, so it would feel too bad to wipe us out. The music we made using synths was us translating our emotion in to a format computers could understand. The Agency could not have done what they did without them. I know I sound like a nutcase, but it’s true. I can’t prove it, no one can prove any of this, but we all know it’s true.”