Sunyata Ontology, a collaborative album from North Carolina-based INTERSTITIA and New York-based GRIDFAILURE, will see release in June on Pax Aeternum, who today issues the record’s cover art, track listing, preorders, and first single/video, “Call Of The Black Hand.”
INTERSTITIA is the ambient, electronic, instrumental solo project of Graham Scala, also of Bleach Everything, US Christmas, Harmonic Cross, Collapse Culture, and more. Since its inception in 2019, the unit has released multiple albums, EPs, and singles, independently and through the Pax Aeternum label imprint which he co-operates. The output of INTERSTITIA is psychedelic and transportational, looping mutated techno rhythms and fried ambient textures into something immersive and disorienting.
GRIDFAILURE is the apocalyptic audiovisual solo project of David Brenner, also of Diminishing. With dozens of records and recordings released since its 2016 inception, GRIDFAILURE operates both as a solo act as well as a collaborator-heavy collective, with countless notable musicians taking part in the records and a rotating cast of live improvisers. While regularly releasing music through Nefarious Industries confirmed upcoming records for SuperNova Records, Anti-Corporate Music, Disorder Recordings, and more, a wide array of instruments, percussion, vocals, and more cast a suffocating style of dark ambient and experimental demoralization, infusing elements of jazz, world music, dark hardcore, extreme metal, and more.
Conceptually based in a new Cold War, Scala and Brenner merge their primary elements on the dense Sunyata Ontology collaboration. The ten-movement album envisions a disparate not-too-distant dystopian America, with military/espionage tactics, civil unrest, off-the-grid cults and militant factions, covert government police, the takeover of artificial intelligence, and the looming threat of nuclear catastrophe more realistic than ever. The signature, psychotropic, sci-fi, techno beats, structures, and electronics Scala creates with INTERSTITIA are here doused in ominous low-end tones and broken communications through an amorphous blend of GRIDFAILURE’s caustic guitar, bass, percussion, keyboards, synths, pedals, field recordings and more, with Brenner’s demoralizing vocals sporadically erupting through the sulfuric fog.
Sunyata Ontology was recorded by Graham Scala in Asheville, North Carolina and David Brenner in Valley Cottage, New York, the final mix and mastering handled by Scala, and the cover art was created by Brenner with additional direction by Scala.
The first single from Sunyata Ontology, “Call Of The Black Hand,” has been released through an ominous video created by Brenner. Scala states, “With the ‘Call Of The Black Hand’ video we wanted to emphasize the narrative nature of the album in a way that stayed true to the fragmented quality we’d applied to the whole thing. I can’t speak for Dave, but when I was working on my parts of the album, I was less influenced by other musicians than I was by writers like William Burroughs, Samuel Delaney, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gibson whose disorienting approach to structural elements treat concepts like reality and linear time as malleable playthings rather than something to be taken for granted. Like those predecessors, we set out to make something psychedelic in the most menacing way possible and the video is a testament to that mentality.”
Watch GRIDFAILURE & INTERSTITIA’s “Call Of The Black Hand” video RIGHT HERE.
Sunyata Ontology will see digital release on Pax Aeternum on June 9th. Preorders are live at the INTERSTITIA Bandcamp HERE and the GRIDFAILURE Bandcamp HERE.
Watch for additional videos/singles from Sunyata Ontology to be issued over the weeks ahead.
Sunyata Ontology Track Listing:
1. Call Of The Black Hand
2. Omega Agency
3. Atomic Priesthood
4. Traces Of Cult Factions
5. Clandestine Interrogation Tactics
6. A Grim Calling Card
7. Population Compliance Attained Through The Dissemination Of A Psychotropic Agent
8. Pattern Recognition
9. Cyanide Tooth
10. Sunyata Ontology
https://linktr.ee/interstitiaaa
https://interstitia.bandcamp.com
https://linktr.ee/gridfailure
http://www.gridfailure.bandcamp.com
https://www.youtube.com/@gridfailure
https://www.facebook.com/paxaeternumdigital
https://www.instagram.com/paxaeternum
https://twitter.com/pax_aeternum
https://paxaeternum.bandcamp.com