Tune In     Song History
|
GENERAL DYNAMICS is the new project of recording artists SARIN + QUAL. “WEAPONIZE YOUR DREAMS”, their debut full length album features 8 tracks of industrialized techno & electronic body music. Clocking in at 37 minutes these tracks have been carefully recorded, assembled, programmed and sequenced over the last 3 years in person in Athens & Berlin to create an intense and sustained sonic attack guaranteed to rip through the subconscious mind.
Wet Skin is an exercise in secrecy and lurid confession; electronic music inspired by the emotional hangovers of digitally mediated sexual encounters (and non-encounters). Each song on the debut album from Wet Skin is a vignette of isolation and frustration against the market’s ethos of constant connection and overbearing permission to indulge. Pornography at the limits of capitalism and cybernetics; choosing a date reduced to a casual fusion of shopping and gaming. Songs like “Sex Negative” offer a meta-thematic confrontation with the proto-incel themes of some industrial music. Other tracks such as “I Hate What You Like” are less heady, airing a rageful annoyance at the constant push-pull between enlightened criticism and ‘just letting people like things’. Musically, “Animal God” maps out a space between the slinking mid-tempo grind of “Concrete Jungle”-era DIVE and the guilt ballads of “Pretty Hate Machine”-era Nine Inch Nails. Drawing on themes from Michael Mann’s 1986 masterpiece “Manhunter,” the speaker in all six original songs tries to face up to the disturbing (and increasingly forgotten) reality that we’re more like the monsters we deplore than we’d usually care to admit. Occupying an underworld of shadowy, whispering ambiguity the track list plays like an unearthed chest of lost disclosures. Disorientation hangs over every word in “Hide From The Light”, an intimate, depressive, polar bookend to the album’s detached, hedonistic opener “Exposure”. The menacing cover of Red 7′s “Heartbeat” casts the original song’s portrayal of romantic desire in an even more grim light than when it appeared in the end credits of “Manhunter”. The album is rounded out by eviscerating remixes from Statiqbloom & SARIN.
Black Dahlia is a Sydney based electronic music project fusing elements of new beat, EBM & industrial. Along with live and DJ performances in her native Sydney she has also released on labels such as Up North Records (Au), Deep Scan (Au), Insane Industry (Italy), Idlestates (Scotland), and soon to be Motorik Records (Au) as well as this first release on Berlin based X-IMG. Her upcoming EP “Animasochist” on X-IMG is an explosion of sex, fetishism, and empowerment; samples from vintage sexploitation and pornographic films, interviews about fetishism, and 80s cinema milieu paired with the sounds of New Beat and EBM, which has become Black Dahlia’s signature sound. Digital release February 5th with tapes to ship shortly after.
The first X-IMG vinyl is the result of over a year’s worth of planning culminating in a tightly curated 6 track compilation. “Dystopia in Action” is the 12” successor to the previous & internationally focused “Self-Aware” cassette compilation series, featuring artists who have been part of the label’s slow yet steady cult like spread over the last 5 years. Also included on the compilation are more established artists previously unreleased by the label such as Qual & Kris Baha. The 12” v/a serves as a laser guided & bludgeoning sampler of fresh underground acts operating within the wider scope of club oriented contemporary dark electronic music. Artists from Colombia, Greece, Denmark, Canada, France & Germany are represented here.
“Humanity in its self-inflicted godly state awaits the Singularity as the Second Coming. Salvation in the face of technological decay.” Nordstaat returns to X-IMG with six hypnotic and melancholic techno cuts layered with his signature black metal soundscapes and industrial atmospheres. His latest release is both a condemnation and adoration of the New Man; an ode to a dying realm and to servants of an artificial origin… |
