The Death Of Rave

NYZ

Old Trx [87-93]

The Death Of Rave

“Following his mind-bending ’SHFTR FRQ’ LP for The Death of Rave in 2018, the award-winning, UK-born and Aussie-based artist/scientist excavates his HD from a golden era when synf and computer music boffins were building the future in bedroom studios, using then early versions of Cubase and Amiga software to establish the templates for decades of rave and electronic dance music to come. However, like a rare, mutant dinosaur skeleton that doesn’t fit historic models, NYZ’s unarchiving of ‘OLD TRX [87-93]’ offers a complex and unusually chaotic range of ideas for this era - from meditation tape-sampling downbeats to nutty proto-speed garage and animated noise - that plays out like a comic book or pulpy sci-fi narrative and smartly showcases the breadth of Dave’s prized imagination and technical nous. In 11 parts arranged for a properly immersive listen, ‘OLD TRX [87-93]’ wends from squashed ‘80s cyberpunk sci-fi in ‘damage’ to the hypnagogic swag of ‘self_hypnotic_tapez’ via a spectrum of mutant dance floor and avant oddities alongside a bezerker breakbeat razz in ‘patheticsocialmisfits’ and what sounds like proto-speed garage in the warped bass of ‘flatline’. But he never uses the same drum pattern twice, and thanks to the inclusion of wildcards such as the scorching noise piece ‘JP4_PhonosonicsRM_DRN’ and the sleazy proto-trance of ‘CEZbulgan’, the sequencing ideally lends itself to jacked-in headphone mooches as much as domestic and raving use. The results are surely comparable to the haunting early rave and ambient sound of AFX’s ‘SAW 85-92’ as much as the freaky...

NYZ

SHFTR FRQ

The Death Of Rave

"The Death of Rave plates up the first ever vinyl release from NYZ; the cult, algorithmic/generative music project of award-winning artist/scientist Dave Burraston (Bryen Telko, Noyzelab), featuring one track using synths given him by Richard D. James - a peer and star of Dave’s famous ’SYROBONKERS!’ interview. ’It comes highly recommended to followers of Russell Haswell’s kaotic gnash, the mind-bending tunings of Aphex Twin, the visionary algorithmic scapes of Roland Kayn, and Eliane Radigue’s microtonal meditations.  ’SHFTR FRQ’ showcases the breadth of Burraston’s experimental research into algorithmic/generative composition. The A-side revolves 14 succinct blatz ranging from cranky percussive pieces to queered microtonal dissonance and SAW II-like atmospheres - notably including one track made on a Sequentix Cirklon sequencer and PreenFM2 synth gifted him by Richard D. James - while the B-side contains a steeply immersive spectral drone tract that (never) ends in a locked groove, especially cut at D&M, Berlin. The results are wholly unique and speak to the endless, playfully experimental variation of NYZ’s art/research. They reveal visceral, alien microcosms of curdled microtonal tunings and proprioceptive chicanery bound to thrill and induce strange, new sensations in even the most hard-to-please fiend of electronic music. In Dave’s own words: “SHFTR FRQ is a series of experimental studies into simple synth setups controlled by varying levels of generative complex systems [MANIAC cellular automata]. Recorded over the last 6 years on an ever changing hybrid of equipment encompassing the domains of modular & MIDI based microtonal sound synthesis [analogue & digital]....

Teresa Winter

What The Night Is For

The Death Of Rave

“Breathtaking bad dream of a second album by Teresa Winter for The Death of Rave; a uniquely allegorical study in female sexuality and occult, transgressive fascinations that comes highly recommended if youre into Cosey Fanni Tutti, Coil, Jani Christou or Jean Rollin.  Unfolding around recollections of a bad dream about being murdered by her boyfriend and hidden under a hotel bed, Teresa’s new side expands upon the morbid, psycho-sexual and occult fascinations of her cultishly acclaimed ‘Untitled Death’ LP in a singular and unpredictable style of composition where avant-classical, acid-house and ambient dream-pop collapse in a confounding and traumatic account of her hauntological reality. Recorded in Northern England amid the socio-political tumult of 2018, ‘What The Night Is For’ is concerned with notions of liberation and repression, both sexual, psychic and political, which feel ever more impending in the nocturnal, criminal state of mind conjured by capitalism’s end times. Teresa’s music reflects this sensation of heightened alertness and near-psychedelic intensity with an abstract dramatic narrative implicitly referencing on the one hand, the convention-challenging feminism of Jean Rollin’s cinema fantastique and its soundtracks, and the charged atmospheres of Coil, as well as the sexually liberated writings of Amanda Carter and the Marquis De Sade. In its unfairly weighted formation, the LP vertiginously drops into freefall with 7 minute of ‘marishly captivating dissonance in ‘Canticles of Ecstasy’, landing in 9 minutes of disquietingly lush ambient electronics and Teresa intoning “bestial, brutal” on ‘Heathen’s Gate’, which marking her descent into night, proper.

Gabor Lazar

Unfold

The Death Of Rave

Gábor Lázár mutates 2-step, grime and electro prisms with economic yet ravishing effect on Unfold, his solo début LP proper for The Death of Rave. Following an acclaimed split LP with Mark Fell ( which was deployed to stunning effect in Aphex Twin’s live/DJ sets of 2017), the Hungarian artist has harnessed the scything contours and mentasmic vamps of his earlier releases into 8 inexorably funked up frameworks set to brilliantly mess with modern ‘floors. Big recommendation if yr into Errorsmith, SOPHIE, Jlin, AFX, Lorenzo Senni...  Kerning classic styles with devious ballistics according to a mutant syntax reflected in the LP’s bespoke sleeve art, Gábor galvanises his signature flux of zinging mentasms and hyper rhythms with a cyber-mongrel gnash in Unfold. Drawing from the deeply affective and rude ends of South Yorkshire, Detroit and South London technous for inspiration, Gábor consolidates their mutual aspects by trimming the excess and stressing the funkiest points of syncopation with razor sharp, inventive edits. Whilst instantly recognisable as Gábor’s work, his grooves are more pronounced, and this time unusually riddled with melodic gestures that lead to moments of unexpected emotive relief.   In the contemporary field, Unfold firmly lives up to comparison with the sexy retro-futurism of Mark Fell’s Sensate Focus, the advanced playfulness of Errorsmith’s Superlative Fatigue, or the fluidly knotted syncopation of Jlin, but does so with a singular mesh of style and pattern that Gábor can patently declare his own. Heard in context of the album cover’s bespoke GL...

Cam Deas

Time Exercises

The Death Of Rave

Cam Deas is a guitar virtuoso who has switched to modular synth and computer productions resulting in these staggering studies in polymetric, mercurial and dissonant tunings - hugely recommended if you’re into the work of Autechre, Rashad Becker, Roland Kayn, Fis, Coil, Xenakis.  Time Exercises is a complex study in amorphous polymetric rhythms by Cam Deas for The Death of Rave. His first album composed solely for modular synths and computer, Cam’s follow-up to the acclaimed String Studies for Luke Younger's Alter label marks a headlong tilt from acoustic to electronic spheres with a staggering effect resulting from meticulous research and process. It sounds as advanced as Xenakis or Roland Kayn superstructures, with the rhythmic displacement of FIS or Autechre, and with a grasp of slippery, mind-bending timbral dissonance comparable to Coil and Rashad Becker records.   Cam’s six Time Exercises form both a bold break with - and an extension of - the avant, folk, blues and outernational traditions that he’s worked to deconstruct and fluidly syncretise over the past decade. In the past four years he’s stepped away from the guitar as a compositional tool, turning to electronic hardware in a focussed effort to consolidate myriad tunings and meters with a precision that had previously eluded him in the acoustic sphere.   Severed from the tactility and sentimentality of instrumental inflection, Cam’s disembodied music plays out a thrilling dramaturgy and syntax of alien dissonance and disorienting rhythmic resolution. Harmonic shapes as densely widescreen as those...

The Sprawl

EP 2

The Death Of Rave

“Mumdance, Logos and Shapednoise remerge The Sprawl for a banging, incendiary second EP in their trilogy inspired by William Gibson’s Neuromancer - the 1984 sci-fi novel which uncannily presaged The Internet and aspects of AI which have since morphed from fiction into reality.   EP2 is about ‘Data Flow’ and thus catches the trio in flux between flashbacks of noise as information overload and brutalist techno chronics seeming to emulate the sensory obliteration of full frontal temporal sickness.   Each producer’s individual characteristics are parsed and consolidated in a fractious transfer of energies, placing themselves as cybernetic semiconductors in a quantum network of emerging AI consciousness, pooling corrupted memory banks of physical and pharmaceutical ecstasy, excess and synaptic muscle memory to manifest premonitory visions of future hardcore rave as hyperstitious, viscerally IRL.  The A-side picks up directly from EP1 with the invasive strategies of Burning Chrome - so titled in reference to Gibson’s short story which first coined the term “cyberspace” - fulminating pure sound designer noise in bruxist shockwaves punctuated by lush pads, before the cyberpunk terror of Black I.C.E. hacks into the nervous system with sickening, arrhythmic dynamic, strung out between chest bursting ecstasy and stomach churning panic.   That’s all seemingly in preparation for X System, a 150bpm bunker breaker lodged on the B-side with a cold fusion of lamping bass drum and slithering plasmic timbres sounding like some Dutch or NYC ‘90s techno bomb dialled in via a faulty ISDN connection, which makes for a...

Teresa Winter

Untitled Death

The Death Of Rave

Gorgeous new album from Teresa Winter, an uncanny collection of ambient / dream pop / entheogenic reveries that comes highly recommended if you're into anything from Grouper to F Ingers to Leyland Kirby to Delia Derbyshire to early AFX.  Teresa Winter’s LP debut Untitled Death is a hallucinogenic wormhole of sensuously ambiguous pop and electronic experiments primed for the after-after party and altered states of reception. Realised thru a mesh of strategies from live, lo-fi tape recordings of synths, samplers and vocals to nascent experiments with algorithmic software, it's both a divine revelation of new aspects to Teresa’s sound and and expansion of The Death of Rave’s as-yet-unidentified aesthetic, which should come as a very welcome surprise to anyone who fell for her remarkable post-rave reverie, Oh Tina, No Tina, released on tape by Reckno in early 2015 to cult acclaim.  Where the artwork and collaged sound of Oh Tina, No Tina signified a serotonin-soaked pastoralism and MDMA thizziness, Teresa’s zoomed photos of magic mushrooms spattered in popping fluorescent oils which adorn the cover hint at her change of focus to a more personalised, entheogenic insight and psychoactivity, or basically a proper, lush trippiness. And just like the putative psilocybic experience, Untitled Death naturally comes on in waves of synaesthically-heightened sensuality, from strangely libidinous stirrings to utter, eat-your-heart-out euphoria with a spectrum of hard-to-explain and unexpected sensations in between.  We can hardly recall a more seductive album opener than oh, which blossoms from plaintive drum machine and...

Croww

Prosthetics

The Death Of Rave

“The long-awaited debut release by yung new producer Croww for The Death of Rave, somewhere between a mixtape, imagined soundtrack and demonstrative showreel pieced together from a Slipknot sample pack used by the band’s Craig Jones on their landmark debut album and highly recommended if you're into Autechre, Rabit or Total Freedom.  The severely gurned and kerned result is the Prosthetics (MechaMix) unique to the vinyl edition, and four constituent Prosthetics, featuring the original samples painstakingly dissected and assembled in uchronic form to suppose an alternate history of the last 20 years of pop and subcultural phenomena, one where rap metal is dissolved and alloyed with the extremities of grindcore, flashcore, late ‘90s D&B and hypermodern rap instrumentals. Safe to say it sounds like naught out there right now.  Gestated from the seeds of a conversation after 2015’s Moss Side carnival, Prosthetics has grown into a sort of hybrid golem via intensely scrupulous sessions spent panning the original sample pack for flecks of precious, vantablack metals. In the process it became as much a study in coming to terms with formative influences as an exercise in sui-generis sculpturing, effectively forming a noumenal sidestep around the sub-cultural phenomena of Slipknot’s (like it or not) landmark debut record - an album which, at the time, sent shockwaves thru teenaged suburban bedrooms and the kind of clubs you could then get into with a fake ID.  With the benefit of hindsight, Croww has acknowledged and figuratively taken those early influences...

Maxwell Sterling

Hollywood Medieval (2017 Edition)

The Death Of Rave

Hollywood Medieval is an album about the glaring disparities and elaborate, underlying convolutions the composer observed and felt while working as a nanny for wealthy parents during his film composition studies at UCLA in the early part of the 2010s. Using an augmented a palette of classic DX7 and Juno 60 synths along with a severely warped bank of library samples and iPhone recordings, it spells out a queasily evocative simulacra of the city in flux, animating a sort of Ballardian tableaux that’s hyper-descriptive in its rendering of the hazy, dosed-up, and often delirious transitions between Hollywood's glamour and grime, using LA's gurning facades and ostentatious wealth as prompts for a richly visual side of sawn-off emotive signposts and jazz-taut turns of phrase that vividly etch on the memory in neon freehand.  From the dizzying sugar rush of the opening sequence, Hollywood Medieval I, to its spiralling counterpoint in Hollywood Medieval II, the album is an inception-like concerto, with Maxwell smartly subverting the film score composer’s role by placing the music centre stage and allowing the narration to be carried by virtuosic flourishes owing to his classical and jazz music schooling, as he explains “one compositional intention was to push the sample libraries to their limits, testing their claims of being ‘realistic’, and finding the points at which they break and falter and become something new and less recognisable.”  From the dizzying sugar rush of the opening sequence, Hollywood Medieval I, to its spiralling counterpoint in Hollywood Medieval...

Treanor, Rian

Pattern Damage

The Death Of Rave

The Death of Rave is buzzing to present Rian Treanor’s 2nd EP of pointillist footwork and hyperchaotic garage deviations nearly a year since his nerve-sparking debut.  Pattern Damage demonstrates an increased spatial awareness whilst revealing a skizzy taste for hi-tech noise torsion as much as lush, raving, modernist hooks in four crisply diffracted derangements.  The EP’s four cuts pursue angular mutations of 2.1-step and and early Warp techno into faster BPMs and colourfully chromatic, sidewinding structures, all driven with a breathlessly forward, quicksilver style that’s entirely Rian’s own and with few comparisons in the current field.  Operating exclusively at a signature 150bpm temporality, the Pattern Damage EP finds Rian both opening out and refining his sound, greeting you with the brutalist, grimy n0!se of Pattern_A1, which sounds closest to SND or Errorsmith’s most oblique twisters, before the dub chords and skittish rhythms of Pattern_A2 recall Autechre getting off at Niche Club (R.I.P.) and Damage_B1 comes off like a giddier, footworking answer to Hyph Mngo before Damage_B2 unfolds a super cute and tricksy origami syncopation.  By splicing the syncopated swing ’n parry of Sheffield’s speed garage sound at +8 with the whirlwind flux of Chicago footwork, Detroit jit and the dizzying dynamics of Max/MSP software, his sound dances in a double refraction of ideas and influence between US, Afro-Caribbean and UK dancefloors in various stages of integration and mutation; following a line along Black-rooted dance music and the sharpest edge of experimental electronics in a way that’s...

The Sprawl

E.P.1

The Death Of Rave

THE SPRAWL is a scindicate of mutant soundcarriers individually known as Logos, Mumdance and Shapednoise. Following their improvised live conception at Berlin’s CTM15 festival, EP1 documents THE SPRAWL’s debut studio transmissions in the first of a series to be archived by The Death of Rave. As their moniker suggests, The Sprawl is heavily influenced by William Gibson’s eponymous and prescient trilogy of sci-fi novels; most crucially the cybernetic predictions of Neuromancer and the ways in which its notions of uploaded consciousness and the effects of technology have played out in our collective reverie. Hacking up memories of late ‘90s tech-step and the millenial dread of early grime thru a matrix of modular synths, haptic constructs and computer software, the trio))) jack-in a quartet of corrupted memory updates emulating the physical and mental impact of SimStim overload and fractious hyperreality. Head first, ‘Drowning in Binary’ plunges into a maze of recursive techno-chambers vacillating white hot dis-torsion with arcing, weightless pads, before glyding across a tumultuous topography of chrome burning flares and violent, body-quaking detonations in the morphing scape of ‘From Wetware To Software’.With ‘Haptic Feedback’ they grasp the quicksilver rush of classic Prototype and Reinforced Records in a strobing sequence of picnoleptic, kinaesthetic flashbacks and transitory segues smeared with vision-blurring noise, stranding us in the below-kelvin, post-human headspace of ‘Personality Upload’ unaware of up from down. By design or chance, the results distill a scrambled uchronia of references, incomparably conflating the obscure French speedcore subgenus of La Peste with a ruffneck...

Treanor, Rian

A Rational Tangle

The Death Of Rave

Rian Treanor re-imagines the intersection of club culture, experimental art and computer music with ‘A Rational Tangle’, his debut quartet of glass-cut, 150bpm hyperprisms for The Death of Rave. Galvanising and accelerating garage and techno with cuttingly crisp tonal diction and pointillist percussive palette, ‘A Rational Tangle’ demonstrates Treanor’s adroit and finely-nurtured rhythmelodic instincts through a quicksilver syntax of kerned, polychromatic 2-step patterns and whipsmart, emotive jit music. Functionally titled A1 thru B2, the EP’s four tracks vacillate ping-pong ballistics and recursive melodic motifs constructed in Max/MSP, dancing from pendulous, aerobic minimalism to taut, synthetic tabla grooves with grid melting nous, whilst also taking in gamelan-esque hypeR&B through wormholes of smeared and curdled harmonics, plus one dead lush section of Detroit-via- Yorkshire styled hi-tech funk. The production is stainlessly dry and future-proof whilst his arrangements are considerately efficient, yet it’s all blessed with a pop or ‘floor-ready turn of phrase that reveals new kinks, fills and twysts with each return listen. Whichever angle you view it from ‘A Rational Tangle’ forms a rewarding introduction to the work of a very promising and distinct new voice in electronic music. Rian Treanor (b. 1988) is an artist and producer based in the North of the UK. His practice references the dynamic cut-ups of Fluxus and Dada as much as UK dance music to present an insightful and compelling musical world of interlocking and fractured components. He has formerly studied with Lupo at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering, besides years spent running the Enjoy...

Black Mecha

AA

The Death Of Rave

The Death of Rave is proud to host the initiation of Black Mecha, a new project authorised by Fortress Crookedjaw ov WOLD, introducing a sci-fi vision of heavy electronics strongly informed by the outer limits of black metal and a cryptic, esoteric weltanschuuang. Official communiqué from the Grand Lodge of Internal Masonry: “Black Mecha AA provides fragmented metaphoric sci-fi audio conceptualization based around some of the formative ideology developed by the Grand Lodge of Internal Masonry. With centralized focus on the deterrence and defence technique aspects of Internal Masonry, namely, Black Ray and its resulting Architecture Antithesis, or AA, mental effect, the six tracks create a realm conducive to execution of thought rumination, and an embankment for sharp inner pathways.”  For us, Black Mecha does not exist safely within any pre-defined idiom. It is by nature a noumenal gesture in the void, projecting uncharted escape beyond staid, putative perceptions of genre. Fascinating for its sense of discipline and focus, Black Mecha AA is poised in the balance between meditative hypostasis and raging yet controlled emotion, characterised in the bellicose momentum of Starship Aspicio or the strobing, stately majesty of Altruego, and to cataclysmic impact with the eviscerated electronics of Black Ray.  But make no mistake: it’s not showboating industrial noise or melodramatic angst; the sense of control amidst panic and dread is palpable and compelling in a way hardly experienced with such elemental force. For listeners of a steeled disposition and open mind there is a logic and ingenuity at...

Fell, Mark + Gabor Lazar

The Neurobiology Of Moral Decision Making

The Death Of Rave

**Hardcore, FWD dance music from two leading sound artists. Mastered by Matt Colton** Mark Fell and Gábor Lázár ratchet the game with their razor-sharp debut collaboration, 'The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making'. As promised in the wake of Gábor's acclaimed vinyl debut, 'EP16', the duo have colluded on a full set of ten tracks, ranging from short synapse bursts thru to an uncannily emotive 12 minute masterpiece on the closing side. As the 10th release on The Death of Rave, it demonstrates the distance travelled since the early '90s paradigm shift of original rave culture, effecting a radical recalibration of meter and tone conventions in electronic/dance music, and by turns, acutely probing our perception of time and space. Essentially it's incredibly "funky", if "funk" is taken to mean syncopation or a play on tension-and-resolution. By utilising the grid-morphing potential of Max/MSP software, they unlock mutant ballistic patterns cleanly weaving between and recoding the tendons and ligament of techno, garage, footwork and hardcore with muscle memory-reprogramming impact. Kicks, claps and visceral chromatic stabs land at irregular, blind-spot junctures, acutely rewiring our sense of rhythmic anticipation and offering a thrilling new freedom of expression and dancefloor discipline in the process. It's a masterful step forward from Yorkshireman, Mark Fell's Sensate Focus output and SND classics, and, likewise, a logical leap from Budapest-based Max whizz, Gábor Lázár. If you're into Mumdance, Errorsmith, Lorenzo Senni, Autechre, Actress or SND; we'd say it's as essential as they come.

Gabor Lazar

EP16

The Death Of Rave

Prodigious minimalist Gábor Lázár twysts out six cuts of super-forward techno reductions on his debut vinyl, 'EP16', for The Death Of Rave. Combining viscerally affective electronic timbre and hyperkinetic patterns, they're real-time recordings of Gábor extracting maximum funk from a single note rendered as sheer gradients pitched and punctuated with unique, algorithmic meters. In a sense the process is drily academic, but f**k me if the results aren't seriously funked-up.  As with Mark Fell, Errorsmith or EVOL before him, Gábor seemingly intersects myriad minimal dancefloor patterns - hardcore, footwork, electro, digital dancehall - with uncompromising electronic tones to create some kinda new rhythmelodic syntax and grammar of his own. Cannily nudging every scything, whirring, strobing hit off-the-grid, he's practically re-programming our sense of rhythmic proprioception and temporal awareness in real time, throwing down the gauntlet to body and brain with stoic rigour and reckless effect.  'EP16' follows Gábor's split tape with Russell Haswell for his Budapest-based Last Foundation, plus debut album, 'ILS' (2014) for Lorenzo Senni's Presto?! label, and precedes an incredible upcoming 2LP collaboration with Mark Fell. Highly recommended for the skilled DJs, inquisitive ears, and liquid-limbed dancers.