On June 6th the highly-established Death In Vegas return with new album ‘Death Mask’, where disintegration, overload and total sonic immersion tell a personal tale. With dirty circuitry and rough-hewn textures at the fore, this is gritty, unpolished techno; an audio outlier that’s full of personality, and a bold artistic statement. It’s closer in DNA to the grainy growl of sunn O))), or the searing intensity of Underground Resistance at their fiercest, and as far from generic influencer business as you could possibly get.
Raw in both senses, as well as unbridled electrical grit, ‘Death Mask’ is raw emotionally too. From Death In Vegas’ mainstay Richard Fearless’ own birth in Chingola, Zambia, to his father’s funeral, and the solace of his partner, the album reflects on Fearless’ own life, loved ones, and grief. Seeped in heavy emotions and torrents of volts, the results are some of the most strikingly visceral and human electronic sounds you’ll hear.
Multiple thematic channels are fed through Death in Vegas’ machines, with Fearless literally processing his feelings, working them through as a form of electronic primal therapy. More than just tattered gnarliness though, an unconventional beauty radiates through the noise. Like light refracting through a filthy, cracked stained-glass-window, icy IDM melancholy juxtaposes perfectly, with caustic rave power.
Broader inspirations are weaved into the album’s fabric too; from his Thameside Metal Box studio and evocations of nautical ghosts, to lamentations for a broken world, to memories of a youthful Detroit pilgrimage, and the innocent fraternity of rave euphoia, there’s a lot going on, acting as a chronicle of moments, and locations.
To the casual observer, with their mercurial catalogue, Death In Vegas might seem a hard act to pin down, but everything they’ve done is in fact grown from the same dirt. From the scuzzed-up beats of ‘Dead Elvis’, ‘The Contino Sessions’ narcotic rock n roll; the sleazegaze psych of ‘Scorpio Rising’; the krautwwerk klang of ‘Satans Circus’; the stroboscopic frazzlement of ‘Trans Love Energies’ and the gauzy throb of ‘Transmission’, each made its bed in the cosmic slop.
This time round, when asked about his influences for ‘Death Mask’, Richard comments, “I’ve been soaking in Ramleh’s ‘Hole In the Heart’, the machine funk of Terrence Dixon’s Population One, Jamal Moss’ psychedelic techno jams, the stunning minimalism of Mika Vanio’s Ø and Panasonic, the layered drones of LOOP, and drowning in the acid of TM 404.
Most centrally through, I’ve been inhaling the deepest dub, from Mark Ernestus’ distillations, to the principles of originators like King Tubby and Scientist. As someone who’s always been obsessed with the genre, I loved the idea of recording live takes as separate stems, then doing dub-inspired mixes of these stems through my console.
Some of the gear I use has a tendency to take on a life of its own, for example the Effectron delay which Arthur Russell also used. It was feeding back on itself, and ended up sounding like a radio conversation – literally voices from within the machine. On the Echoplex, the tape has never been changed. It’s eroded by the hands of time. When you record over the tape, things bleed in from what was there before, like voices from past
