North Carolina-based instrumental electronic/ambient outfit INTERSTITIA is preparing to unveil its second album, Hermes Slips The Trap, through Pax Aeternum on July 16th. With the album now less than a month from release, the new single “Rye Wolves” has been issued through an exclusive premiere hosted by BrooklynVegan.
Asheville, North Carolina resident Graham Scala is a punk/hardcore lifer who plays with Harmonic Cross, Bleach Everything, Collapse Culture, Arepo, USX, and more, with Souvenirs Young America, Highness, Forensics, and many other bands also featured on his resume which now spans more than two decades. Though previous efforts as INTERSTITIA saw Scala moving away from the more aggressive guitar-based music he’s made in favor of a more spacious, textural, electronic approach, his newest full-length Hermes Slips The Trap pushes that methodology to a bracing, intense, extreme in which radiant ambient synth textures are overlaid upon frantic, in-the-red breakbeats then shredded by disorienting psychotropic noise textures. Songs bend and contort in ever-mutating forms, leaving a product as frenetic and dizzying as it is ecstatic and expansive. Like Four Tet playing a Providence basement show or Blanck Mass on a Black Dice kick, Hermes Slips The Trap immerses the listener in an overwhelming sound world in which consonance and dissonance cling so tightly as to be indistinct from each other and ideas like genre seem quaint and inapplicable.
Boasting more than fifty minutes of music through six tracks, all sounds, art, mixing, and mastering for Hermes Slips The Trap was handled by Graham Scala, with conceptual inspiration from Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World and Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key.
With the album’s new single, Scala offers, “‘Rye Wolves’ was the first track I finished for this album, and it set the tone for everything else. I wanted to maintain the exuberance of my previous releases while pushing the songs in a more intense direction. The disorienting ‘everything louder than everything else’ approach I took steered the album towards something less comfortable and more caustic without sacrificing the tone and the energy I had utilized in the past. I enjoy a lot of harsh music, but I think it’s vastly more subversive to make harshness accessible just as I enjoy a lot of quiet, cerebral music but think that sort of thing is considerably more potent if it’s a little frayed around the edges. So, while ‘Rye Wolves’ is the harshest song on the album, it helped establish a modus operandi for the remaining material.”
BrooklynVegan writes, “Graham recently released lead single ‘Monument Eternal’ and we’re now premiering second single ‘Rye Wolves,’ both of which find this punk/hardcore lifer churning out beat-driven electronic music that’s simultaneously noisy and melodic, sounding a little like Blanck Mass or the more upbeat Jon Hopkins songs.”
Listen to INTERSTITIA’s “Rye Wolves” first only through BrooklynVegan now at THIS LOCATION.
Exploratory digital imprint Pax Aeternum will release Hermes Slips The Trap on July 16th. Find preorders at the label webshop HERE.
Watch for additional audio previews, videos, and more from INTERSTITIA to post over the weeks ahead.
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