Following 2022’s ‘Rough Dimension’ LP, Noel Skum – aka Andrew Clinco of Drab Majesty – made the radical leap of expanding his psychedelic post-punk vehicle VR SEX into a fully collaborative five-piece band. To christen the new group’s camaraderie, they booked a block of studio time in Glassell Park, swapped skeletal iPhone demos, and “did that classic thing of a band making the exact record they want without any interference.” Working 12-hour days, they banged out the basics in a week, then tracked the rest over a month, fine-tuning it with flourishes, FX, and amplifier experiments. Hard Copy is the result – 10 tracks of sneering psychedelic punk streaked with Chrome-damaged freak-outs and snotty power pop harmonies chronicling sex doll love affairs and glue-sniffing fatales.
Mixed by guitarist Mike Kriebel – an accomplished engineer with dozens of credits across the punk, goth, and garage underground – the album is dense, rich, and spatial, spurred by Clinco’s muse of “reckless abandon.” Shadows of Chrome, Stickmen With Rayguns, Japanese psych, and loud- quiet-loud grunge anthems flicker here and there, but ultimately VR SEX’s mode is more sardonic and saturated, oscillating between ripped leather riffing and space echo meltdowns. Banning plug-ins was a mission statement, with most instruments tracked direct into the board, then guitars added via a daisy chain of amplifiers, panned and mixed and matched for maximum intoxication: “My goal is always to load up every take with as much sound as possible in one pass.”
Lyrically, the record revisits the project’s perennial fascinations: twisted lust, cheap thrills, dirty money, doomed delinquents, and ruined romance amid the creeps and cracked dreamers of gritty city voids. The title refers to the uncanny valley between “facsimile and the real thing, and the illusion that one is better than the other – when both come with their own menu of delights and demonic pleasures.” Hard Copy embraces extremes and outliers, delusion and perversion, the conflicted dimensional depths lurking in every exploded heart: “I can be ugly / I can be strong / I can be proper / I can be wrong / I can be lovely / or I can be gone / the thing that will haunt you is still hanging on.”
LP / Digital Alum
2023 retrospective from Dais Records.
Cassette / Digital Album
Death Bells return with the spiritually guided ‘Take My Spirit Now’, following 2022′s shadowy, post-punk influenced LP ‘Between Here & Everywhere.’
‘Take My Spirit Now’ explores themes of love, paranoia, and destiny. The band enlisted longtime friend Morgan Wright, of Australian label Burning Rose, to mix the EP, with Wright’s background in electronic music influencing the more programmatic elements of the release. The five songs were written and recorded in late 2022, after months of touring North America and Europe. ‘Take My Spirit Now’ introduces an unruly new sound, with jagged guitars careening through towering feedback and textured drums.
Digital Album
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]
Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Stephen Mallinder’s second solo outing for Dais further distills his signature fusion of minimal synth, oblique wordplay, and “wonky disco” into a riveting rhythm suite ripe for our age of escalation: tick tick tick. Channeling the temporal malaise of lockdown through a lusher palette of modular electronics and stereo strings, the songs embrace ambiguity and plasticity, loose systems of percolating circuitry and airless funk. Recorded across a handful of sessions at MemeTune Studios in Cornwall with frequent collaborator Benge (aka Ben Edwards), Mallinder cites no guiding aesthetic premise for the collection beyond “cowbell on every track, and entirely no reverb.”
From the first coiled cybernetic groove of opener “Contact,” the album’s spatial dynamics are disorienting and asymmetrical, alternately cold and sensual, opiated and claustrophobic. But, throughout, “rhythm is the default, the bedrock, the building block – even the melodies are rhythmic.” Across 40-plus years of electronic musicianship, Mallinder’s sense of timing and tempo has honed into a rare tier of mastery, limber and fluid but knotted with strange frictions. Shades of Detroit technoid industrial (“ringdropp,” “Shock to the Body”) crossfade into no wavy punk-funk (“Guernica Gallery,” “Galaxy,” “The Trial”), bad trip IDM (“Wasteland”), and jittery vapor house (“Hush”), at the threshold of modes both familiar and foreign.
Lyrically the record is equally evasive, rich with allusions and associative linguistics, surveying liquid notions of societal noise, ecological ruin, art world pretension, and the trials of daily life. But the lack of fixed meaning remains Mallinder’s main muse: “Music should draw you in; lyrics should make you think. Most interpretation is misinterpretation.” This is music of countdowns and comedowns, fleeting pleasures and opaque futures, observing the great decline while dancing on its ashes. Flux is deathless and forever; the rest, illusion: “I will be a constant figure / Flickering a moving picture / Turning in your head forever / Split apart but held together.”
LP / Digital Album
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