Tasukete, the second collaborative album from New York solo outfits GRIDFAILURE and MEGALOPHOBE and the first title from either act to see release under the diverse Nefarious Industries banner, will be set loose upon the public in early October. PopMatters is now streaming the record’s title track ahead of its street date.
Created in several sessions in 2017 and early 2018, Tasukete was fully performed, recorded, and mixed by GRIDFAILURE‘s David Brenner at The Compound in Rockland County, New York and MEGALOPHOBE‘s Benjamin Levitt at Forked Audio in Brooklyn, New York. With eight tracks ranging between two and nine minutes in length, the two artists employ a barrage of random recording tactics, capturing the abuse of electric and acoustic guitars, bass, drums, keys, synth, accordion, harmonica, and more, with a bombardment of vocal styles, all generally wired with enough effect to dam the Hudson. Levitt’s brother Rob Levitt performs on several of the tracks, and the cover art was handled by Paul Tierman and David Brenner.
With the premiere of title track of the record, the artists offer, “On the song ‘Tasukete,’ we pour layers of processed field recordings and mistreated electronics into a tense four minutes and twenty seconds of madness. The lyrics, a twisted cry for help referencing the translation of the title (Japanese for ‘help me’), are delivered by both of us, our vocals bent and battered into near oblivion. We felt that as the title track, it should represent the eclectic character of the rest of the album and it manages to do that while, fittingly, it resembles none of the rest of it. As the industrial rhythm materializes and then melts down and oozes into the track’s end, it reveals itself as the perfect song to accompany a total breakdown; play it at work and see for yourself.”
PopMatters writes in part, “‘Tasukete’, the song itself is a noisy nightmare, a soundscape to the struggle of the soul in the contemporary urban climate, the sound of late capitalism trapped in a spit bubble and a discarded piece of chewing gum on a subway platform… This isn’t music as much as it is Cinema Verite as imagined by two auteurs who’ve been raised on a steady diet of Wolf Eyes and the sounds of Hell’s Kitchen in the early 1980s.”
Stream “Tasukete” by GRIDFAILURE & MEGALOPHOBE at PopMatters RIGHT HERE.
Nefarious Industries will release Tasukete on all digital platforms and via limited-run eco-wallet CD on October 5th. Find preorders at the label webshop HERE, and stream the first single “Agoraphobic Claustrophobia” with preorders at GRIDFAILURE‘s Bandcamp HERE or MEGALOPHOBE‘s Bandcamp HERE,
Watch for additional audio previews, videos, and more from Tasukete to be issued in the days ahead.
Levitt continues to join Brenner’s live lineup of GRIDFAILURE, with more being plotted for the fall months. MEGALOPHOBE and collaborative live sets for the Tasukete record will be organized.
GRIDFAILURE Live:
10/27/2018 Huggy Bear Manor – Philadelphia, PA
The connections between these two rogue units run essentially to the core of both. Shortly after the genesis of GRIDFAILURE in 2016, creator David Brenner and friend Benjamin Levitt hooked up a random recording session, which spawned not only contributions from Levitt to several GRIDFAILURE releases, it also cemented MEGALOPHOBE as an entity, and led to the first collaborative album, Dendritic, self-released in April 2017. MEGALOPHOBE has since released its eponymous debut EP which included contributions from Brenner, GRIDFAILURE has morphed into a live entity which includes Levitt, and the two have been constantly at work on a plethora of new collaborative material.
GRIDFAILURE and MEGALOPHOBE‘s unplanned first joint album, Dendritic, was released in early 2017, and it was not long after that the material which would evolve into their second unplanned album was birthed. During recording sessions for another upcoming collaboration, some of the material became too deranged for the planned concept and was quickly corralled into a separate wing of the testing facility and reclassified as Tasukete – Japanese for “help me” – as seen in the language lab in the movie The Exorcist. While Dendritic bore spacious, nature-oriented movements flooded with field recordings, Tasukete runs rampant with unhinged confusion, contorted executions, and explosive self-immolation through strenuous psychosis, as the two artists treat themselves as self-crash-test dummies strapped into their own torqued contraptions.
http://www.facebook.com/gridfailure
http://www.gridfailure.bandcamp.com
https://twitter.com/gridfailure
https://www.instagram.com/gridfailure
https://megalophobe.bandcamp.com
https://twitter.com/megalophobe
http://nefariousindustries.com
http://www.facebook.com/nefariousIndustries
http://www.twitter.com/nefariousInd
https://nefariousindustries.bandcamp.com