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The Crucifix – Psychopunk 2165

Robin Ono — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 19:35:14 +0000

From Russia with synths comes a fresh, young producer on his way to shake the retrowave scene. 22-year-old Saint-Petersburg-based artist The Crucifix has just released his sophomore full-length Psychopunk 2165, a cyberpunk neo-noir concept record blending the chaos and violent side of retrofuturistic sci-fi-themed darksynth with the melodrama of gothic neoclassical arrangements. Though the young producer wears his influences on his sleeve, the record delivers an impressive, action-packed experience with a lot of youthful charm and passion.

The Crucifix ‘Psychopunk 2165’ is out now on Bandcamp and Spotify.

GUNSHIP Releases New Single and Video, Announces Album “Dark All Day!”

Andrew Zistler — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 08:06:32 +0000

Synth titans GUNSHIP have returned on this very lucky Friday the 13th to announce their upcoming sophomore album “Dark All Day!” Along with this radical announcement comes the release of a new delicious single and bloody brilliant title track – “ Dark All Day (feat. Tim Cappello and Indiana) !”

Accompanying this monumental track is an insanely gruesome and groovy new music video that is sure to melt your face and steal your heart …or, well, at least your blood!

“Dark All Day,” now open for pre-order and scheduled to drop October 5th, is slated to be a much darker release than their first, taking GUNSHIP into new sonic territories – though I am happy to relate that they haven’t lost an ounce of their iconic groovy synthpop sound.

The music video for “Dark All Day” is a direct salute to cult classic “The Lost Boys,” and even features the very sexy sax man himself Tim Cappello of the original film ripping out an amazingly vibrant performance. Also featured are the luscious vocals from Indiana which blend perfectly with the synth and sax to create a truly memorable track.

In the video, which is a mix of animation and live action, we find GUNSHIP playing a show in a vampire infested Santa Carla. Famous vampire hunters such as Blade, Buffy, and Seth Gecko from “Dusk til Dawn” act as their bodyguards – but it isn’t long before things go to hell.

Packed into this awesome music video are numerous references to quintessential retro films and anime such as Predator and Berserk. Arguably more important, however, is that as the video switches to live action at it’s bloody climax – we see our first glimpse of GUNSHIP themselves, Dan Haigh, Alex Westaway, and Alex Gingell – their first appearance in any of their music videos.

‘Dark All Day’ is available for pre-order now. (PRE-ORDER DIGITAL HERE) The album contains 13 tracks and is available in a deluxe limited edition 180g double-gatefold 45 rpm vinyl set with special lenticular cover, as well as in a brand new Special Edition ‘16-Bit Box Set’ which includes signed CD and a plethora of new GUNSHIP goodies!. (VINYL AND MERCH HERE)

“Orphans of the Smog” New Video from Death of Lovers

Sam HaiNe — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 20:49:58 +0000

It was mid afternoon in Tucson, AZ when I spotted a post on Instagram about the new video from Philly shoegaze outfit DEATH OF LOVERS. The second video dropped today and what kept my interest wasn’t just that they were from Philly but, that they were made up of mostly members of NOTHING. Nothing being a very well received and popular indie noise rock group from Philadelphia signed to Relapse records.

Death of Lovers new single, “Orphans of the Smog” has a slightly more up tempo vibe than their first single “The Absolute”

with obvious influences from The Cure and Joy Division. The rolling beat giving way to the delicate vocals from frontman Nicky Palermo.

Directed by Kevin Haus and shot on location on the streets of Kensington under the “El”. The track is a taste of what’s to come when their sophomore album, “The Acrobat” is released on Dais Records.

As for me, I’m officially a fan. I recommend everyone go give a listen and a few dollars up to their debut EP, “Buried Under A World of Roses”, a hauntingly hypnotic album of fuzzy shoegaze goodness that makes you think you’re back at the dawn of the New Romantic era of the 80s or the amazing Brit-Pop explosion of the nineties with groups like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. Go Check it.

DEATH OF LOVERS: https://deathoflovers.bandcamp.com/album/buried-under-a-world-of-roses

A Darker Side of New York in The 80’s

NewRetroWave — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 21:30:49 +0000

Incredible shots of NYC in it’s gritty stage. Nothing like what it is now. Look at home much grime there used to be…

Photography by Steven Siegel

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“Remember This… Werewolf (TV series)” (1987–1988)

NewRetroWave — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 15:41:38 +0000

“Remember This… Werewolf (TV series)”

(1987–1988)

I was 5 years old when I first saw promos on Fox 5 for a new horror series called Werewolf. The promos told you nothing of what was going to happen, just an ominous voice warning you that this was nothing you’ve ever seen before. You didn’t know anything. There was no internet to spoil the plot or the cast; you just had to wait for the premiere.

The show aired with a two-hour pilot and 28 half-hour episodes before being cancelled in 1988. In the United Kingdom the series aired on Sky One from 1989-1990.

In some respects the series was a knock off of the very popular Fugitive and the Incredible Hulk series starring Bill Bixby, except with a werewolf angle leaning toward supernatural horror.

Werewolffollows the unfortunately adventures of Eric Cord as he wanders the American landscape in pursuit of Janos Skorzeny and the only cure for his lycanthropy. Hunted by a bounty hunter and constantly suppressing the beast within him and away from innocent lives, Eric’s only hope is to kill Janos Skorzeny and severe the bloodline forever.

“Grad student Eric Cord’s roommate and best friend Ted gives Eric a gun with silver bullets and confesses that he is a werewolf, bitten while he was working on a boat owned by Captain Janos Skorzeney. A pentagram appears on his palm a few hours before he changes. The only way to end the curse is to kill the original werewolf in this bloodline. Eric ties Ted up but he changes, breaks free and bites Eric, who is forced to shoot him. Charged with murder, Eric jumps bail and begins searching for the werewolf who bit Ted, who turns out to be Skorzeney. Eric is pursued by “Alamo Joe” Rogan, a bounty hunter who saw Eric change and now uses silver bullets.” Written by Anonymous

The special effects techniques used in production were considered first-rate and impressive for the time, specifically the transformation sequences, in which, for example, the pentagram-shaped scar on Eric’s right hand would rise, thicken and grow three-dimensionally, and begin to bleed. All werewolves were designed by award winning legendary special make up Fx artist Rick Baker (American Werewolf in London, Harry & the Hendersons, Planet of the Apes, and more).

Here is a link to view the complete pilot episode in its original two hour form which begins with possibly one of the best opening monologues for a series of this genre.

Starring: John J York as Eric Cord, Lance LeGault as Rogan, Chuck Connors as Skorzeny, Raphael Sbarge as Teddy, and Michelle Johnson as Kelly.

Directed by David Hemmings and written by Allan Cole and series creator Frank Lupo, with music composed by Sylvester Lavey. And originally aired July 11, 1987 on the Fox Network.

Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1975)

Sam HaiNe — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 15:44:43 +0000

Originally titled the Hatchet Murders, Deep Red or Profondo Rosso was a major critical and international success and the first collaboration between Dario Argento with progressive rock group Goblin.

Deep Red is an Italian giallo murder mystery following a jazz pianist and teacher deeply embroiled in the murder investigation of a psychic medium after she is brutally attacked and murdered in her apartment. Starring: Macha Meril, David Hemmings, Gabriele Lavia, Daria Nicolodi, Clara Calamai, and Glauco Mauri. From Rizzoli Films and directed by legendary Italian director Dario Argento with music from GOBLIN.

The perfect Halloween movie for you retro lovers because before SUSPIRIA there was Deep Red; A prized possession in anyone’s dvd collection and one of my personal favorite slasher films. This was the first true example of what Argento was capable of. The use of colors, visual imagery, cinematography, and of course music would become signature characteristics of the master of the macabre. This film has everything you need.

Co-writer Bernardino Zapponi said the inspiration for the murder scenes came from Argento and himself thinking of painful injuries to which the audience could relate. Basically, not everyone knows the pain of being shot by a gun, but almost everyone has at some point accidentally struck furniture or been scalded by hot water. The close-up shots of the killer’s hands, clad in black leather gloves, were performed by director Dario Argento himself.

This was also the first collaboration with Daria Nicolodi, who later became his wife and frequent recipient of his most notorious on-screen murders, as well a co-writer on Suspiria.

Although not as layered or cerebral as his later film Tenebrae (1982) Deep Red plays out like the M. Night Shyamalan film that we are happy M. Night will never direct or ruin. In other words the film is straight to your face with a meat cleaver and as graceful as a killer wearing black gloves.

Deep Red has been very well received by critics. It currently holds a 95% approval rating on movie review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on twenty-two reviews.

Multiple versions of the film exist on DVD and VHS, in large part due to the fact that Argento removed twenty-six minutes (largely scenes between Nicolodi and Hemmings) from the film, footage that was never dubbed in English. For years, it was assumed that the film’s American distributors were responsible for removing said scenes, but the recent Blue Underground Blu-ray release containing the US version of the film (which is referred to as “The Director’s Cut”) and the original edit (referred to as “Uncut” and contains option to watch it in either language) confirmed that Argento oversaw and approved the edits to the film.

Therefore, let’s start our retro Halloween season with a scream and watch Dario Argento’s classic Deep Red.

Stay fit. Stay nocturnal. Stay elegant. Stay alive, all you cute little somebodies and keep your fingers on that rewind button.

Zombie: The Unearthed OST by SurgeryHead (Featuring GosT)

bryan.eddy@newretrowave.com — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 14:37:56 +0000

Zombie: The Unearthed OST by SurgeryHead (Featuring GosT)

Ooh, I was very excited to get the greenlight on this one. Horror fans, especially old-school gut-munchers like myself, have fond memories of Lucio Fulci’s classic undead flick Zombie. A valued part of my VHS collection as a horror-obsessed teen, Zombie tells the now-familiar “zombie plague” story, but with less rubber science and more awesome gore and FX.

Emmet Kiernan, aka SurgeryHead, made this tribute to the original soundtrack to coincide with Rough House Publishing’s comic book version of the film. The comic itself features art by Derek Rook, and is incredibly hard to get ahold of now, as I found out to my dismay. The album art, however, is by the same artist, so you get a teasing taste of what you’d expect waiting within the pages. Hopefully some of you will be able to succeed where I have failed and get a look at the comic, but the soundtrack is LUSH. It is incredibly atmospheric, and even seems to tell the story itself. The titles all reference aspects or even scenes of the movie, but for the most part this is a loose interpretation; you couldn’t definitely glue a track to a scene. That’s fine though… most of it’d fit anywhere. This is Hollywood quality score work, and I don’t just say that as hyperbole. It is crisp, clean, and precisely effective. There is no overuse of anything, and while parts of it seem minimalist, that’s actually for the best. Music for horror isn’t supposed to be overpowering; it’s like putting ketchup on a hamburger… you don’t want to drown in it.

As far as highlighting individual tracks, “Underwater Hell” is an excellent example. It builds slowly, using just enough drum-sound while keeping a steady climb in volume. “The Bloody Dawn of Maldye” has a bit of grungy nastiness to it; it grinds, burns slow, and evokes the heartbeat of a frightened victim. “I Buried You, But I See You Walking” is perhaps the most insidious of Kiernan’s works on the album; between light drums and low thrumming tones, you hear sounds that might even make you think of a dentist’s drills. Shudder-worthy. “Zombies, Everywhere!” is another one that steadily climbs to new heights of terror; there are even some tastefully-placed church bells!

My personal (admittedly biased) favorite is GosT’s remix of the original title music for the film. Everything GosT does makes me imagine purposefully hitting someone with a semi tractor-trailer. And I love it. The original pumping beat is present, but GosT’s signature chainsaw distortion and cutting high notes lend a modern and grisly taste to the recipe.

Lastly, I’d encourage our readers to spend the 4 euros to buy the album because not only is it great, but its profits go to Doctors Without Borders, helping people who’ve survived real catastrophes. And if zombie films taught me anything, it’s that without humanity’s capacity to work together and heal its wounds, we are doomed.

I give this album eight out of ten, and it earned it. SurgeryHead and GosT are two of my favorite artists in our scene, and they’ve acquitted themselves well in this homage to Fulci’s work. Eat up!

STREAM HERE

Zombie: The Unearthed Soundtrack by SurgeryHead (featuring Gost)

COMMUNITY RATINGS

THIS WEEKS MUST LISTEN TO ALBUM IS…..

NewRetroWave — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 17:58:00 +0000

NONE OTHER THAN

DANCE WITH THE DEAD

WITH

SEND THE SIGNAL

THIS EP IS EVERYTHING!!

SEND THE SIGNAL by DANCE WITH THE DEAD

NRW

Interview – GosT

bryan.eddy@newretrowave.com — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 20:09:00 +0000

I recently had a chance to have a digital sit-down with one of retrowave’s darker, more sinister artists…. GosT. It turns out that despite his Satanic malice, the apparition had much to share with me during our meeting.

1. Thanks for agreeing to an interview! Let’s get right to it… what got you into music as a whole?

I do not remember a time that music wasn’t a big part of my life. If I had to pick a moment or period of my life that I remember as pivotal, my parents had a Kiss pinball machine in our house when I was very young (which I still own). So as a child I was instantly drawn to Kiss. The make-up the pyrotechnics, the insane boots! My mother was also always listening to current rock music which left a very lasting impression on me that is still with me today.

2. Clearly your work is horror-influenced. What horror films from the 80s affected you the most, and what about them?

A Nightmare on Elm Street terrified me as a child but I was simultaneously drawn to it as well. This was the film that started my love of horror for sure. The knife glove was so badass to me! Also the first two Halloween movies were massive for me. John Carpenter’s score for those films just blew my child head off! The film Silver Bullet with Corey Haim was also in constant rotation among my group of childhood friends.

3. Not that I mind at all (in fact I’m into it), but what’s the deal with the Satan imagery? It seems to be something you gradually adopted.

I’ve always played in metal bands so it just kind of naturally found its way into this project. Also, I live in a very small town which is dominated by Christianity and the obnoxious passive aggression that community throws at non-believers. The negative of that belief is an easy way to distance myself from the religious right in my community and the world… Basically HAIL SATAN!

4. Who are your biggest influences musically?

As I said before Kiss has always influenced me. My influence are fairly vast and kind of all over the place. Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Suicidal Tendencies, NIN, Danger, SebastiAn, Depeche Mode. I could literally go all day but these bands in particular hold a lot of influence for Gost.

5. On the “Skull” EP, it’s easy to notice a jump in overall production value. What’s behind that? New equipment? Better facilities?

I started Gost to just have something I could do on my own without an actual band. People started to really show interest which made me want to do better. With Skull I started spending loads more time on actual production and trying to make something somewhat different from the rest of the synthwave community.

6. What’s next for Gost? What can we expect? I know you’ve been doing some track remixes and stuff, but is another album coming?

I’ve just signed with Blood Music which is crazy to me! They have already put massive amounts of energy into my next release. I am releasing my debut LP the first of 2015 with them! There are a couple surprises that I think my fans will be pretty stoked on and I can’t wait to share all of this. I am also releasing a remix I did of a Carpenter Brut track for free DL on Halloween.

GosT’s Bandcamp page

IN THE ZONE WITH XES – PAY ATTENTION RETRO HEADS!

NewRetroWave — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 13:57:00 +0000

1. Hello XES, it is very nice to meet you. Can you please tell us a bit about the group as a whole? (How/where/when did you meet etc. We will get into the individuals later)

Hello, nice to meet you too and thank you very much for the interview! It is an honor.

Straight to the answer – we are a duo. The band consists of me – Pasha Star, and my friend Pavel Saushkin. We’ve met when I was searching for a musician to start my own music project. I really loved the way he perceives the music, the way he treats melody and can play with bits of sound creating our unique sound. That is what I like about our partnership – I create songs in my head and Pavel manages to transfer it in reality as I have pictured it. Nonetheless, his own work is very nice and I do not create all of the songs of course. The band formed in July 2014, after we tried to make couple of songs together. It was like a trial period to test whether we can manage cooperation and do something really interesting. It worked out as you may see. After some paperwork we started to build our name.

2. Can each of you (band members) give us 5 interesting facts about yourselves.

Pasha Star

: Ok, I will try first. Most of it is somehow connected to Japan, because I started my singing career there.

1 – I can speak and write lyrics in Japanese;

2 – Failed at Sony Music Audition Japan in the finals, because I was so nervous I strained my voice.

3 – I took part in variety of Japanese TV shows and commercials as a model and a singer during my time in Japan.

4 – I am Russian but my background is a mixture of different ethnicities.

5 – I am almost 6’4 tall.

Pavel Saushkin

Well, as for me….

1 -hmmm

2 -well….

3 -……

4 -….I

5 -…..Hmmm

Pasha Star

: He is a genius!

Actually it was harder than I thought because when it comes to describing oneself all of the memory just disappears into somewhere and at the same time nobody wants to look like a boaster

3. How would you describe your sound?

Pasha Star

: Right now, we have no particular genre in mind. We do identify ourselves as an electropop band, but our upcoming album will consist from different music genres – starting from synth pop and/or nu-disco ending with witch house. We want it to be a like a space travel – each song is a different planet.

Pavel Saushkin

: Eventually, we believe, this should bring us to something even more interesting in terms of genres and style. Let’s see where it takes us.

. The video for “Black Tears” is immense, but it also seems like there is a hidden meaning behind the video. Could you explain what we witness?

Pasha Star

: Actually, it is a start of our Black Tears Saga project. We are planning to create and include a game and some short animation clips coupled with our music. It is a highly metaphysical, surreal, and allegorical story about a girl named Destiny. She is blind but she can see the world through the sounds, spoken words and her own imagination. The music video puts a viewer in a scene where she has fallen into the lies of a Dark One, who has deceived her into thinking that the Saint – the guy in white – is in fact a Liar and that false “truth” makes her cry the tears of grief empowering the Dark One. The guy in white is the Truth as he carries the attributes of strength and weakness at the same time: a strong body but he is handicapped. There is a lot of symbolism such as the table that represents life and the masks that carry the idea that the whole world is a theatre and etc.

There will be a continue which will cast some light on the plot we are trying to represent.

5. How did you guys get to work with Origa?! THATS A PRETTY BIG FEATURE!

Pasha Star

: I admired her music since I was a child. At that time, I did not realize I would be able to record a song with her someday. When I have started doing my own music, I have decided to send one of my demos to her and she, to my utter astonishment, responded. Since then we’ve worked together on some of her songs (I was responsible for writing some of the lyrics) and when we were about to release our debut single “Black Tears” I asked her whether she can add some vocals to it. She agreed and the result turned out really great.

6. What more can we expect from you in the near future?

Pasha Star

: In terms of music – we have many ambitions and we will surely release something really good in the near future. As our band’s name stands for eXperimental Electronic Sound we plan to experiment and make something unique and at the same time pleasant to listen to. As for the rest, as I already mentioned – we are going to continue developing our music story, and most important we are soon to start performing live, so do not forget to check our social networks for information and updates.

7. Where can the retro scene stay connected with you?

Pavel Saushkin

: We are gradually developing our network. Therefore, at the moment you can find us online at

http://www.xes.fm/

which has links to all our social network groups, including our

YouTube channel

http://youtu.be/8VOBvlXFJXI

our Facebook group (

https://www.facebook.com/Xes.fm

;

https://www.facebook.com/iampashastar

VK group (