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Un Hombre Solo’s new mini-LP, Desilusion Total, is a work about the resounding sorrow of everyday life. Literally translating to “total disappointment,” the album by the New York City-based artist Fernando Jz (by way of Juarez, Mexico), continues on in the project’s theme of “loneliness and dissociation from the world.” As a follow up to his 2021 tape release titled Rotundo Fracaso, the complexity of Desilusion Total sonically derives its brutality from classic EBM such as Leæther Strip’s 1992 Solitary Confinement LP and its fierce melodies from Alaska y Dinarma’s Deseo Carnal from 1984. “Based on self-experiences,” writes Un Hombre Solo, “the songs are lyrically written in an expressionist and not necessarily a linear way. Inspired by the work of many bands from the ‘80s Spanish Movida Madrileña—such as Alaska y Dinarama, Paralisís Permanente, and Decíma Victima (the project name comes from one of their albums)—they are presented by what appears to be two different characters, one representing the suffering and the other anger.” The duality of characters in the Un Hombre Solo project are found within the six tracks of the mini-LP—in between the tenacity of the beat and the sorrowful synths that seemingly wail in torment. Desilusion Total begins with the song “Aportando de Nada,” which feels like an Angelo Badalamenti nightmare set to a forceful tempo. It’s followed by the album’s first single, “Oscuro y Podrido,” which is “a song that talks about being trapped in your own void.” Un Hombre Solo’s urgency in his work (especially profound in “Estoy Cansado” and “Desilusion Total”) is cauterized by the melancholy enveloped throughout the LP. “Comportamiento de Ratas” and “La Hora” cling on to the possibility of escape from the futility of the world—sadness abounds, but hope for reprieve remains in their melodic gloom.
The palette and precision of prolific synthesizer composer Hector Carlos Ramirez aka Auragraph have heightened incrementally since the project’s conception in 2018, but Reflection Plane – his 8th full-length, and first for Dais – finds him streamlining his sound even further, to its gleaming chrome essence. Moody pads and sequential circuits cycle through cybernetic galleries of marble, ferns, and flickering screens, at the threshold of film score, slow techno, and hard vapor. The album’s nine tracks deploy an array of 80’s tonalities, from night drive arpeggios to Art Of Noise sample stabs to Seinfeld slap bass, but fused into a hybrid landscape of lucid dreaming and hypnotic horizon lines. Born in the Texas border town of Laredo, Ramirez relocated to Austin for film school, where he became fascinated by the local electronic underground scene spearheaded by SURVIVE and the Holodeck Records network. But it was only after moving to Los Angeles to work in the music department of a film trailer house that he crossed paths with Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein of SURVIVE, who were in need of an assistant for multiple ongoing projects. After helping out on National Geographic’s Valley Of The Boom miniseries, Ramirez officially joined the Stranger Things soundtrack team as a Score Mix Engineer. This intuitive expertise for audio design infuses Auragraph with a unique sense of fluidity and finesse, able to shift gears and integrate contrasts: sleek yet strange, icy but emotive, minimal though rich. Shades of classic EBM, 90’s electronica, and Dreamcast-era video game music glimmer here and there on certain tracks, but the cumulative effect of Reflection Plane is of entering a place outside of time and space, post-human and pristine. These are songs of parallel realities and second lives, freed from friction and gravity, playing on loop in a skybox sculpture garden at the ends of the earth. Digital Album [free download]
Vacant Heads is the duo of Christian Donaghey (Autumns) and Oliver Ho (Broken English Club). Anyone familiar with their work, or underground electronic music in the last two decades, probably needs no further introduction. Having worked together (Autumns’ album ‘Shortly After Nothing’ was released on Oliver’s ‘Death and Leisure’ label) and shared stages over the years – Vacant Heads was borne from a desire to both collaborate on tracks and form a live unit. Their debut self-titled EP is a bold taster of where Vacant Heads are at and where Vacant Heads are headed. These four tracks reek of a brutal and busted city – after hours prowls with fuck all to do and nowhere to go. |
