Ah, the first Tracks post of the new year. These weekly posts always act as a kind of roadmap for I Die: You Die, both as the anchor to every week and as a sort of guide to what trends and ideas are becoming prevalent across the vast scope of Our Thing. And while we know that these sorts of tides aren’t actually separated by the calendar year in any real way, but we can’t help but be excited by all the possibilities a new year of them heralds. What new classics have we yet to hear? What long-forgotten acts will come roaring back? What glorious strangeness will take us completely by surprise? No way of knowing ’til we get to it, so lets not waste any more time. Tracks is go for 2018.
Severe Illusion. Wake up, Fredrik, the future is now.
Rendered, “Puppetskin (Black Asteroid Remix)”
The deep and endless well of material Daniel Myer draws from seems nowhere close to being exhausted. In 2017 the Basic Unit/Haujobb/Architect maestro teamed up with 14Anger’s Clément Perez to form Rendered, a project that spoke to some of his other contemporary work in the same vein (namely his Liebknecht project) while more strongly favouring minimal styles of techno. Take the title track from recent EP Puppetskin as remixed by another techno guy who knows his way around industrial, Black Asteroid: all propulsion and deep burbling sequences, it’s a deep head nodder with earthquake potential if played on a big system.
Severe Illusion, “All The Way Down”
After plenty of side and solo project releases, the duo of Ulf Lundblad and Fredrik Djurfeldt have reconvened as Severe Illusion for the first time since 2014’s Deliberate Prefrontal Leucotomy. We’ll have some more developed thoughts on new EP A Familiar State Of Passive Compliance later, but hopefully by now listeners know what they’re in for: measured and punishing material which borrows from electro-industrial, dark electro, and death industrial in order to cast an unblinking eye at humanity’s worst tendencies.
Cardinal Noire, “Useful Idiot”
Finnish duo Cardinal Noire come roaring back with a murderous electro-industrial number in “Useful Idiot”, the first taste of their forthcoming album for audiotrauma Deluge. The self-described “Vancouver school” act put out a tremendous self-titled album a few years ago on EK Produkt, showing off both their capacity for old-school programming and sound design and uncommonly strong grasp on hooks and melody. We’re quite excited to hear everything they have in store for us, especially coming on strong this early in the new year.
M‡яc▲ll▲, “Simulacra”
We’re not sure that the ideas of Jean Baudrillard are exactly the first thing that come to mind when we listen to M‡яc▲ll▲’s self-described bloodwave jams, but maybe there’s something in the mysterious outfit’s resampling and refiguring of spooky and occult themes from across the march of culture which brings the notion of the simulacrum to mind. Regardless, the new The Precession of Simulacra EP is a quick blast of the combination of beats and atmospheres we’ve come to know and love from M‡яc▲ll▲.
Xorcist, “Rise”
Holy shit, sometimes something doesn’t seem real ’til it’s right in front of you. Heads of a certain age will all tell you that Xorcist was a big deal and hella influential in their day, releasing gritty dark electro and post-industrial tracks in the 90s. The idea that they have a new album set to drop in 208 after their lengthy absence (punctuated by the occasional odds n’ sods release) is exciting, if only because we need to know what direction Bat aka Peter Stone is taking the project. Judging by new track “Rise”, God may not be like anything we’ve yet heard from Xorcist, which is what we’d hope for anyway.
Kangarot, “Pale Blue Dot (Overview Effect Mix)”
Josh Reed’s style as Kangarot remains all his own, but we’ve spent enough time with his mix of space-synth and raw electro-industrial that new music from Kangarot feels warmly familiar, if still idiosyncratic and trippy, at this point. Digging the slowly rolling beats and sequences on this one, and keen to see if it portends another full Kangarot release in the year to come.
