We Have A Technical 495: Teddy Riley?

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Meat Beat Manifesto & Merzbow

On this week’s podcast we’re using the occasion of Meat Beat Manifesto and Merzbow’s new collaborative record as an opportunity to talk about each project as well as that new record. Both Jack Dangers and Masami Akita’s respective paths and discographies have brought them into proximity with industrial music, but both reach far beyond it, and we’re interested in taking a broader view of each (hopefully with an awareness of the limits of our expertise). As always, you can rate and subscribe on iTunes, Google Podcasts, download directly, or listen through the widget down below. 

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Dermabrasion, “Pain Behavior”

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Dermabrasion - Pain Behaviour

Dermabrasion
Pain Behaviour
Hand Drawn Dracula

Toronto duo Dermabrasion do a solid job of reinvigorating common understandings of post-punk, goth, and the intersections theirin on their debut LP. Simultaneously dishing out seriously heavy and brooding tunes while tossing about all manner of D&D and related imagery, Pain Behaviour is a solid and distinct statement of arrival.

Pleasantly, for a post-punk band interested in exploring gothier territory, Dermabrasion aren’t trying to rehash the Joy Division formula for the umpteenth time, nor is the well picked-over corpse of The Birthday Party being dragged out. Instead, they’re working with a less explored and more muscular form of dark rock which prioritizes heavy bass and thudding machine rock grooves a la Big Black (there’s a kinship with Germany’s Noj in this regard). The level-up that’s happened between the duo’s demo work and Pain Behaviour accentuates this sound. While the preceding material is enjoyable enough, the sheer thudding weight of Pain Behaviour‘s sound makes for a much stronger formal introduction.

Things can be a bit more nimble at times, with “Grim Sister” skipping along a high-wire separating the always contentious dance punk sound and the post-hardcore approach to goth taken up at the turn of the millennium by Heart Of Snow and Antioch Arrow. While heaviness and an overbearing sene of doom are Dermabrasion’s watchwords, they’re smart enough to find ways keep the energy going and not fall into dour spaciousness. Kat McGouran’s vocals are a versatile weapon here, shifting from a husky, forlorn croon on excellent opener “Halberdier” to a frothing-at-the-mouth shriek on “Proving Grounds”.

Terming themselves a “death rock and roll band” makes for a nice squaring of Dermabrasion’s circle. Beholden neither to the more restrictive elements of goth nor the austerity of post-punk (again, we’re talking about a band with tracks named “Magic Missile” and “Goblin Dance” here), the thrashing grooves which make up Pain Behaviour can be parsed by the listener in accordance with their own taste and moods. Recommended.

Buy it.

Pain Behaviour by Dermabrasion

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KMFDM, “Let Go”

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KMFDM
Let Go
Metropolis Records

How do you even assess the quality of a KMFDM album in 2024? The long-running industrial rock band have remained active for the entirety of their 40 year history (their brief dissolution in the late nineties notwithstanding), and have amassed an audience who are happy to have a new album from them every two or three years regardless of any questions of musical or critical relevance. Really, KMFDM have the freedom to do whatever they want creatively and it’s not going to impact their ability to tour or put out records so long as they stick to the same tongue in cheek, self-effacing attitude that they’ve been working since the late eighties.

With that in mind, new album Let Go is mostly notable for the contrast between the times when Sascha Konietzko and company are playing it safe and those times where they genuinely take a creative swing, successful or not. And admittedly, it’s mostly the former; if what you come to KMFDM for is some chunky guitar riffs, meat and potatoes programming and lyrics that vaguely hint at some broad but not especially substantial sloganeering, the record has you covered. “Push!”, “Erlkonig” and “Totem E. Eggs” (?) are boilerplate KMFDM through and through, uninspired but competent.

Still, there are just enough interesting moments to feel slightly frustrated that a band of their prominence doesn’t try a little harder. Single “Airhead” in which Lucia Cifarelli (a presence in the band now almost as synonymous with their identity as her husband Konietzko) delivers a personal reminiscence of her life tied to a “keep on keepin’ on” inspirational message isn’t a great song, but its overt alternative rock styling makes it stand out. It and “Touch” are moments where the band more closely resemble Garbage, or closer to home The Birthday Massacre, and that’s something different and therefore notable.

Even in some of the more standard types of track you get ideas which could be taken in genuinely interesting directions. The title track mostly plays as a rewrite of any number of cuts from the catalogue, but tosses in a bridge with synth horns and Chic-style guitar that has some genuine disco funk to it. “Next Move” is aimless from an arrangement standpoint, but the vocodered voices, little hints of big beat electro and twinned guitar and bassline are all fun musical elements in search of a better song to be a part of.

Then again, KMFDM’s ubiquity makes Let Go being what it is unsurprising; any band that has declared that they suck so often that it’s become a cheeky point of pride is inured from the slings and arrows of ex-fans, critics, and the like. If you’re someone who has stuck with them for this long, it’s hard to imagine you’ll have much to complain about, while those who jumped ship any time this millennium won’t find a compelling reason to reactivate their fandom. It’s KMFDM, doing it again. And again. And again.

Buy it.

LET GO by KMFDM

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Tracks: February 12th, 2023

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As we enter late winter here in Vancouver, aka the Rainy Season (/jk, every time of year is the rainy season) it kind of feels like the calm before the proverbial storm. With tons of upcoming shows we’ll be attending, the onset of festival announcements for the summer and fall, and the ramp up of the release calendar, it’s important to take a few moments and enjoy how chill things are before everything goes bananas. Then we get a week like this in Tracks and it all hits home, things are gonna get going sooner rather than later.

Kontravoid

Cam Findlay fixin’ to Akira Slide his jet-ski through the apocalypse.

Kontravoid, “Reckoning”
Cam Findlay aka Kontravoid is the endboss of modern electronic darkwave, and the announcement of the forthcoming LP Detachment via Artoffact already had us pretty amped. Then the video for “Reckoning” dropped last week and things got real wild. Even before you get to the visual aspect of the clip, the vocal distortion and processing, hard body music bass and rhythm programming has the song earmarked for club play, but when you add in the video… well, just click play below and take it in. Get ready y’all, this is gonna be a big one.

LEATHERS, “Crash”
Shannon Hemmett of ACTORS’ LEATHERS project has been due for an LP for some time, and new single “Crash” has us further anticipating that eventual announcement. Having followed the project since its inception, its notable to us how much Hemmett’s songwriting and performance style has evolved – yes, LEATHERS invokes some of the neon eighties markers of synthwave, but eschews the style-over-substance approach that plagues so much of that genre via the application of solid hooks and melodies. Low-key one of the projects we’re most excited to hear new music from as 2024 rolls on.
Crash by LEATHERS

Kanka Bodewell, “Believe”
Hey, did you folks know that Orange Sector’s streaming has blown up thanks to one of their tracks going viral on TikTok a la Molchat Doma? Us neither, and it’s a fool’s errand to try to make sense of this sort of thing in our opinion. In any case, the timing’s good as one half of the anhalt stalwarts, Martin Bodewell has teamed up with Uwe Kanka of Armageddon Dildos for a bouncy, synthpop-styled electro record. It’s not the first collaboration between the two groups, nor is it Bodewell’s first foray into poppier territory, but there’s nostalgic charm to an upbeat track like this.
Stroboscope by Kanka Bodewell

Meta Meat, “Hue”
Hanging out firmly in the left field of Ant-Zen’s broad experimental purview, French duo Meta Meat offer up their first new cuts since 2021’s Infrasupra on the Voices EP. Pieces like this are a display of Meta Meat’s sharp sense for production and sound design, applying downtempo and technoid structures and methods to decidedly more acoustic and earthy timbres, resulting in a sound which is proximal to but still decidedly different from the always thorny “tribal industrial” tag.
voices by Meta Meat

Imminent, “Mythrality”
Let’s make it an Ant-Zen two-fer! It’s been seven years since we had new music from Olivier Moreau, and even longer since there was non-collaborative material straight from one of the pioneers of power noise. The dropping of “Starvation” from Imminent’s moniker did mark a shift away from some of Moreau’s more aggressive and violent soundscapes, but the title track from forthcoming 7″ Mythrality has the frantic kinetic energy we associate with all of his work, regardless of titling, and the counterpoint between the skittering rhythm programming and the spacey arps on this number picks up right where Cask Strength left off.
mythrality by imminent

Front Line Assembly feat. Bootblacks, “Force Carrier (remix)”
Okay, something is afoot here; a few months ago Front Line Assembly randomly released a remix of one of the instrumental tracks from 2012’s excellent Airmech, the soundtrack to the video game of the same name. That track featuring Ayria, was followed by another featuring labelmates Ultra Sunn, and now a remix of “Force Carrier” by Bootblacks, also of Artoffact. It’s a nice take on the sound of the original figuring in some guitar and modern darkwave texture, and makes us wonder: is some kind of 12th anniversary Airmech release in the works? We’ll be keeping our eyes peeled.
Force Carrier (Remix) feat. Bootblacks by Front Line Assembly

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Observer: Psycho Weazel & Tati au Miel

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Psycho Weazel
Mains D’Argile
Iptamenos Discos

The most interesting thing about the explosion of italo-body (that’s the fusion of italo disco and ebm if you haven’t been keeping tabs) for the last few years has been the rapid way that the sound has branched out into other electronic styles, frequently those that were shaped directly by those genres in the late eighties and early nineties. Swiss act Psycho Weazel’s double A-Side single Mains D’Argent embodies that via both its two originals, and their accompanying remixes. If you listen to the title track (on which the duo are ably assisted by genre impressario Curses), you can hear the echoes of italo’s moodier vibe and how it became integrated into synthpop and freestyle, while the remix by Martin & Guy draws the line from those genres into 12″ fuelled dance club culture in the style of Razormaid. Meanwhile, Local Suicide collab “Matra Murena” recalls the ways that retro sounds were rebranded as electroclash in the early 2000s, its dispassionate male and female vocals, big kicks and gated snares settting up some sneaky references to the early stirrings of trance via a big choral melody that contrasts the otherwise sterile mix. No surprise then that the Motor Solo mix and Rafael Cerato mixes follow that trail of breadcrumbs, tossing off builds and breakdowns for maximum DJ mix appeal.
Mains d'Argile (IDI017) by Psycho Weazel

Tati au Miel - Carousel
Tati au Miel
Carousel
self-released

A free-roving producer who moves across noise, field recordings, and pure experimentalism for its own sake, one can never anticipate what the sound of a new record by Montreal’s Tati au Miel will be, but a certain emotionally uncanny pull is almost guaranteed. That’s certainly the case with the new Carousel EP, which gets under the skin with chilly ease in less than fifteen minutes. Opener “La Berceuse” is made up of mild chimes, strings, and dreamily cooed vocals, and while those seem quite different from the circuit bending trippiness which makes up follow-up track “Stuck In A Reverie”, both disarm and unsettle. Based on au Miel’s previous work one is almost waiting for the other shoe to drop in the form of some squalling noise wipeout which never arrives. The reedy, hushed breaks and Satie-like piano through which the vocals wind on closing track (and focal point) “My Heart” finish the Carousel ride with a flurry of emotion, though it never rises above a whisper.
Carousel by Tati au Miel

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We Have A Technical 494: Internal Life of a Skeleton

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Skeletal Family

Skeletal Family

This week’s two albums-formatted episode of the podcast takes up Psyche’s 2001 return to dark dancefloors with the futurepop-flavoured The Hiding Place and Skeletal Family’s stone classic 1985 statement of how tightly dialed in but also expressive and creative early goth could be, Futile Combat. We’re also talking about upcoming shows from Lords Of Acid and Images In Vogue. As always, you can rate and subscribe on iTunes, Google Podcasts, download directly, or listen through the widget down below. 

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Cyberaktif, “eNdgame”

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Cyberaktif
eNdgame
Artoffact Records

The parallels between Cyberaktif’s sole pre-existing LP Tenebrae Vision from 1991 and the industrial supergroup’s 2024 reunion eNdgame are pretty easy to draw. Like its predecessor, the new LP finds Cevin Key and Bill Leeb reuniting creatively for the first time in years (Leeb having been an early member of Skinny Puppy with Key before the foundation of Front Line Assembly), and like that record it reflects the contemporary musical modes of its creators.

If it’s been a few years since you revisited Tenebrae Vision, it’s an album that feels alternately like the FLA material of the time, and the music that Key and musical partner in Puppy and beyond Dwayne Goettel were exploring in their trippy instrumental industrial project Doubting Thomas. And you get the same vibe from eNdgame: there’s a strong sense of the melodic, highly produced sound Leeb and his long-running collaborator Rhys Fulber have been working in their recent FLA albums, and a healthy dose of the psychedelic, textural dub that has informed Key’s production and compositions in recent years.

It’s a combination of musical ideas that is complimentary, and while very few songs on the record stick out in terms of hooks or composition, it is a pleasurable listen. A cut like “Bitter End” takes the laidback and smoked out sound of Key’s bouncier modern programming and welds it to the sleek cybernetic sound design that has been informing the last decade or so of Front Line’s work, resulting in a pleasing organic groove. Opener “A Single Trace” swings in a different direction, riding the sort of solid bassline and drum programming that have been a hallmark of Leeb and Fulber’s catalogue, the atonal blips of its synth lead and vocodered chorus accented by some subtle bits of stereo sound design which feel very Key-like in their application. It’s all very nicely put together and the songs feel like they have a deliberate construction without succumbing to the sometimes jammy nature of Key’s muse or the formulaic approach that has plagued some of the more recent Front Line albums. On the topic of Leeb’s vocals and lyrics – well, they’re fairly on brand, with Bill tossing off non-sequitur couplets like “Poison Gas/Midnight Mass” and “Path of Doom/Poisonous Moon” in his signature processed growl. That’s basically a feature and not a bug at this point; a line like “Clowns are dancing everywhere/Throwing knives like they just don’t care” is more charming than eye-rolling if you’re a devotee.

There are two standout moments in terms of songs, ones that suggest a bit of a different direction the record might have taken. “The Freight” takes the sort of cinematic vibe that Front Line’s video game soundtracks Airmech and Warmech and molds them into a slow rolling ballad that blossoms with some synthwave flourish, distinct for its gradual build and musical payoff. It feels like something neither Leeb and Fulber nor Key might have done on their own, which is what makes the other truly notable track “Broken Through Time” even more interesting for its reach back to the sound of the project’s immortal club classic “Nothing Stays”. The emotional melody carried via the sort of hard PCM drums and the soft-edged synthlines that informed the golden era of both FLA and Skinny Puppy respectively, its reverie more potent simply because the artists so rarely mine that kind of nostalgia in their own contemporary work.

As it stands, eNdgame is neither a throwback to the early nineties, nor a bold new exploration of the potential of the pairing of musicians that made it. Rarely more than pleasant, but never less either, it speaks to the musical evolution of its creators and the ways in which their artistic trajectories both align and deviate after all these years.

Buy it.

eNdgame by Cyberaktif

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Filmmaker, “Hollywood Cult”

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Filmmaker - Hollywood Cult

Filmmaker
Hollywood Cult
VEYL

Look, at this point beginning a discussion of the latest Filmmaker record with a comment about how prolific Fauntes Efe’s primary project is has become a cliche, one we’d fall victim to with more frequency if we were able to cover more than a fraction of that work. Hell, production delays have resulted in one pressing of the last Filmmaker record we wrote up only being shipped now, and in the interim at least two full lengths, six EPs, and a couple of compilations have been released, not including new LP Hollywood Cult.

Still ostensibly rooted within Efe’s home turf of throwback techno and EBM, Hollywood Cult is proof positive of just how much grey area there is between the theoretically distinct worlds of techno bosy music and “mutant” EBM. Specific sounds can be picked out belonging to either camp, but the lo-fi delivery and chaotic if not downright arbitrary arrangement and construction of the tracks ends up taking precedence. Like Bryn Jones or Richard D James, one gets the sense that Efe locks onto a groove or intersection of programming which strikes his fancy, rides it for all its worth, and then moves on.

“Shocking Therapy” finely grates acid squelches into such tiny fragments and jams them into such tight spaces between thudding techno kicks that the listener experiences a sensation closer to panicky itching than the expected builds and falls of classic acid. In fact, that sense that the tracks exist to communicate a certain low-fi, smoggy texture rather than a particular genre or rhythmic register, is the overarching sense communicated by Hollywood Cult. The queasy undertow suggested by the echoing synth flutters beneath the surface patina of percussion on “Peacekeeper Ritual” and the red-lined drum loops and heavily-flanged synth sprains of “Criminal Rite” cinch that impression.

As I alluded to off the top, keeping up with Filmmaker’s releases is no small task, and even dedicated listeners may find it difficult to ferret out substantive distinctions from one release to the next. While that can make exercises like this write-up a bit challenging, it also means that just about anything can serve as an entry-point to the catalog. The counterpoint of of holo-tinted, heavily-phased programming and lo-fi kicks and snares (which could either connote 90s EBM or breakbeats, depending on your personal history) on opener “Secrecy” is as good an introduction to Efe’s aesthetic as one is likely to get at this point. Wide-screen ambition, grainy Super-8 charm; that’s Filmmaker.

Buy it.

Hollywood Cult by Filmmaker

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Tracks: February 5th, 2024

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We both had a fun time this weekend playing sets at Coffin Club, part of the broader Restricted Entertainment crew we’ve been rolling with for twenty-plus years now. Would you even believe that happenstance pitted the Senior Staff against one another, with Bruce playing the goth room at the same time Alex was spinning in the industrial room? Kismet. Anyway, as we often talk about on the podcast, having the impetus of writing for ID:UD has immeasurably helped our DJ games, making sure that we’re never falling back too heavily on nostalgia and that we’re constantly field testing brand new tracks for Vancouver floors. Speaking of new tracks…

Houses of Heaven in the house

Soft Crash feat. Ready in LED, “Free Yourself”
What do you get when techno industrial maven Phase Fatale and italo-body king Pablo Bozzi team up? Pure 90’s NRG it turns out. We certainly were getting big nineties vibes from the duo’s preceding release Your Last Everything, but new release (appropriately titled) NRG is basically exactly what it says on the tin; balearic beats, gated pads, and soulful female vocals abound. The connection to Our Thing is getting pretty strained here(although the Alen Skanner remix of “Your Last Everything” on the EP will probs work on your dark disco dancefloor), but we’re not gonna lie, this still hits with us.
NRG by Soft Crash ft. Ready In LED

Rosegarden Funeral Party, “Doorway Ghost”
Between various reviews and podcasts we’ve been discussing the ways in which new crops of bands are linking classic goth tropes with more broadly accessible styles, and few bands remain as skilled yet also unpredictable at that as Rosegarden Funeral Party. The flashy, speedy glam of new cut “Doorway Ghost” has more in common with The Associates than The Virgin Prunes, and the deployment of sax here feels more in keeping with the long-lost “new pop” movement of the early 80s than saxgoth as we commonly understand it.
Doorway Ghost by Rosegarden Funeral Party

Ultra Sunn, “Shake Your Demons”
Poised for a big 2024, Belgium’s Ultra Sunn will have plenty of folks tuning into US, technically their first LP, when it drops in a couple of months. We’ve enjoyed the slinky grooves we’ve come to expect from the band on the first couple of pre-release singles, but the harder and stricter EBM foundation of “Shake Your Demons” doesn’t just show that US might find the duo casting a bit further afield, but also serves as a great counterpoint to the unexpected big beat/breaks sounds which close this one out.
US by ULTRA SUNN

Black Asteroid feat. Actors, “Ashes and Dust”
Sounds like Bryan Black is bringing his venerable Black Asteroid project to Artoffact Records, with a new LP Infinite Darkness due in May. The electro project has made a habit of working with artists we enjoy, from Zola Jesus to Wes Eisold, and the track listing for the new record suggests that’s a trend that will continue, with collabs and contributions from the likes of Front Line Assembly, LOUISAHHH, Speedy J(!!), Ian Astbury (?!), and our very own ACTORS, who bring some of their trademark polished darkwave sheen to single “Ashes and Dust”. Very keen to hear what this record is gonna sound like.
Infinite Darkness by Black Asteroid

Houses of Heaven, “Within/Without”
We got a tiny taste of the new Houses of Heaven a few months back when producer Matia Simovich played some cuts at a DJ set a few months back, and have been waiting for the record announcement since. Unsure how Within/Without will follow from the tense, dubby sound of the California project’s debut Silent Places, but if the title track is an indicator, we’re gonna get lots of percussion, rich synthwork and some of the same slick melodies that caught out ears a few years back. Keep tabs on this one, we have it earmarked for special attention when it hits.
Within/Without by Houses of Heaven

Trauma Phase, “Challange”
Bozzi & co. aren’t the only ones drawing upon brighter retro Euro sounds. Having woven a fair amount of speedy trance and futurepop sounds into their approach to TBM over the past couple of EPs, Poland’s Trauma Phase continue to expand, drawing on some 80s space disco and maybe just a little bit of 90s Eurodance in order to add colour and drama to this stabby number. They were perhaps hampered by their club-friendly debut being released just when the pandemic was breaking out, but as we’ve said before, Trauma Phase remains one of the most overlooked acts consistently putting out great club numbers.
IV by Trauma Phase

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