Vengeance III by Starfounder

Favorite tracks : Purgatory, Gray Man

Starfounder is out now via Bandcamp.

Taurus ‘Modern Romance’ releases on July 1st and is now available for pre-order via Bandcamp.

Favorite Tracks: Maelstrom, Voyager, Stranded Vision

Dameron ‘Stranded Vision’ is out now via Bandcamp and Spotify

Before getting into the current EP which you’re about to release. I’d like to go back to the start of your career as a solo artist. Where were your musical goals and ambitions at as you moved on from Yellowcard to a solo career?

When Yellowcard first split up, I had been making plans. My original plan was to produce records for other artists, but I learned pretty quickly that it wasn’t necessarily where my heart was at, creatively. If I was going to put in hours and hours of hustling to create a new path for myself, that just wasn’t the way I wanted to go; going to shows five nights a week, doing the sales pitch to bands to get them to come in and work with you… It didn’t feel very fulfilling to me and everything just led me back to making my own music.

It really kickstarted when my buds in New Found Glory offered me a full US tour with them, as an opener and rhythm guitarist. They didn’t really specify what “opening” meant. They probably assumed I’d bring an acoustic guitar and play some Yellowcard songs and I did play some, but it was also a catalyst for me to think about having a record to sell at the merch booth. That’s what led me to record the first EP Thirteen. It was sort of a double-edged sword because I wanted something to have on the tour, but I also wanted to make something so far removed from Yellowcard and anything I’d done before that I knew the hard pop-punk fans on the tour were going to be weirded out. I could’ve leaned harder in the sounds of the past, but I decided to stick with what I thought was right. It was an EP of very stripped down, ambient acoustic tracks. It was hit-or-miss on the New Found Glory tour, for sure [laugh]. There were some nights that were really cool and some nights where I couldn’t hear myself playing because everyone was talking over what I was doing and totally uninterested. I was mentally prepared for that, though.

I started getting some more opportunities to tour, which led me to record a second EP, Virtue. That record took me all over the world and I got to open for Mayday Parade on a full US tour. I also did one solo headlining tour. At the end of all of it, I had to take stock of how much work I was doing to stay on the road and be touring full time versus the return and growth that was happening with it. The pandemic hit around the same time, forcing me off the road. During that time, I really honed in and focused on what I wanted to do, where I want to go.

I really have a desire to move into scoring for film and television, and you can hear the cinematic elements on Everything Except Desire because it’s the first time I didn’t have to consider touring. I was able to cut loose and let all of my influences, which have been primarily electronic, experimental, EDM… It’s been that way for many years, much more than rock n’ roll. I was able to experiment and not worry about how it would tour. Maybe I will play some shows with it, but what it has really done for me is get the ball rolling with a few tracks. I’m constantly creating now. I’m in my studio every day, practising scoring, creating ambient pieces and doing as much as I can to build a collection of songs to show to people and get closer to the goal of scoring film and TV. I think the sound of the EP was very much done with that in mind. I tried to think in a cinematic sense. It’s very movement-driven and I wanted it to feel like the EP had “scenes” that were developing and changing. Being forced into staying at home and working on these tracks really opened a floodgate for me and I’m in a totally new place, musically. I really enjoy what I’m doing and what I’m working towards.

How would you describe this EP if you were to translate it into visual form?

As electronic music does, the whole thing has a certain “pulse” to it. A good example of seeing it visualized is the music video for ‘Face in a Frame’, directed by Stefano Bertelli (Seenfilm : www.seenfilm.com ). The way he used light flares and flashes is one good way to describe it. It’s got pulsing flourishes of light. I tried to make it very colourful with the sounds that I was choosing and the layers that I was adding. I’ve had a lot of experience in the last few years working in the space of electronic music. My close friend Ryan Mendez from Yellowcard and I have been working on a project called JEDHA, which is strictly instrumental experimental EDM. I’ve had a lot of experience working with him building these big, lush soundscapes. This was the opportunity for me to translate a lot of that experience into my solo stuff. My favourite song on the record is the last song ‘Union Chapel’, and one of my favourite moments on the record is when the bass and kick hit at the end of the song to take you out after you had been lost in the trance of the piano arpeggio. It may be a cliché visual, but it does feel like this warm blanket that comes over you at the end of the EP, to cruise you out at the end of your journey.

Back in 2014, you released the album Lift A Sail, which marked quite a departure from Yellowcard’s established sound through its inclusion of electronic elements. Looking back, how did that experience affect your approach to writing electronic music?

That is my favourite Yellowcard record, contrary to popular opinion [laugh]. It’s a very personal record for me and it was a time when my musical palette was shifting so dramatically away from Rock n’ Roll and into Post Rock and ambient EDM. Ryan Mendez has had such a cool, broad palette of musical influences from a very young age. He’s into original Aphex Twin and old Daft Punk. I, on the other hand, grew up fully as a rock n’ roll fan that I had a stigma connected to electronic music, like many people I’ve talked to still have. It still exists. There’s still an idea that it’s not made with ‘real instruments’, and I was that way for a long time too.

Around the time of Viva La Vida, Coldplay started working with Jon Hopkins, and Ryan Mendez is a huge, longtime fan of him. Around that time, Ryan helped me connect the dots from Coldplay to Jon Hopkins by giving me a copy of Immunity. I had never heard and seen a piece of music like the title track on that Jon Hopkins. It just changed my whole perception of electronic composition. It changed everything for me. I started asking for more recommendations went down the rabbit hole of playlists and recommended artists. That all led to Lift a Sail. I was so inspired by these influences but we still had to make a rock record.

Ryan being the more knowledgeable person in the world of electronic music, we tasked each other with him writing the nastiest riffs for the intros and choruses whereas I was in ‘Studio B’ pressing buttons. I was building loops, experimenting with sub-bass and all kinds of stuff I had never done to use for the less intense sections of the songs on the album. I played almost no guitar on that album. I spent most of that record writing lyrics and producing my first ever loop and beats. We ended up with this interesting hybrid record that no one really understood [laugh], but we loved it and I still love it! It was the first record that felt like I was genuinely standing on my own two feet as a writer, as opposed to writing within a genre. I don’t want to minimize or say that the records don’t have value, it’s just that there was this undeniable shift that happened with Lift a Sail. When Yellowcard broke up, Ryan and I immediately decided to make electronic music together. Four years later, we’ve just finished a full-length record, we’re doing a remix for a big band and we’ve been hired to score the first season of a new show for a massive brand. It’s starting to happen for us! It’s funny that you mention Lift a Sail, I appreciate it because that is where it started for me, from a writing and production standpoint.

The first thing that struck me on the album, compositionally, is the heavy emphasis on ambience and space. Vocals are sparse, the arrangements feel quite stripped down and you really give each idea the breathing space it needs.

I owe a lot of what you’re picking up on to the artists that I listen to. I’ve been on a crash course of learning how to make great music through their albums and learning how to create that sense of space. Part of what you’re sensing comes from two things. First, there’s the way the EP was composed in the middle of that summer during the pandemic and I was by myself in the studio, very focused on this specific batch of songs. The songs do feel like they grew up from the same roots. Secondly, there’s the cinematic element of it that I’ve been learning as I’ve worked towards this goal. I pay attention to what showrunners, music directors and editors are looking for. While this wasn’t something that I was writing for a show or a film, I was conscious of how hand in hand this type of ambient electronic music goes with visuals. I wanted to make sure that each song would rise to these places and take moments to breathe because when an editor is looking at a waveform, they’ll just delete the message if the waveform doesn’t look right.

You’ve lived in quite a lot of different places. You’ve been moving around!

Too much! I even lived in Osaka for about two months when I was producing a record in 2019. I left home when I was 19 for the first time to go to California with a band I was playing in. I went home, ended up playing in Yellowcard, moved back to California for a couple of years before going to Manhattan for a year. I moved back to California again… My family is on the east coast and my job was on the west coast, so I struggled throughout my life to find where I’m going to settle. And here I am moving again!

As an album that has such a strong sense of space, would it be fair to say that location  physically affects the places you end up emotionally and how you express them?

Being so nomadic has always inspired my music. It’s helped me as a creator to have new experiences in new places, meeting new people, new people, new bars … it’s always helped me not get stuck in rut as a writer. When my environment is constantly changing it helps my music change as well. I think it’s particularly true for this EP because it was made during such an unsettling time. I was feeling very unsure because I would normally try to do is knock out one or two tours a year, which provides me with the opportunity to be home working on scoring and composing, which isn’t paying me yet. I’m just making stuff right now and hoping that someday it will go somewhere. When the lockdown happened, I was in California and had no place to go and I was freaking out, so I moved back to Florida for a bit. As a result, this EP has so much exploration of self in it. There’s not much storytelling, it’s really about self-reflection. I had to make a choice when I got to Florida to wallow in this stress, anxiety, sadness and fear, or turn it into something good. At the beginning of the pandemic and before leaving for Florida, a lifelong friend of mine got stuck at my house with me in California for a whole month. He’s very active and expresses to everyone he knows how important meditation is in his life, so I started doing it with him. It was the key to my success through the pandemic. When I got to Florida, I was really bummed, I was excited to live in LA again and start to work towards film composing, and here I was back at square one. So meditation really helped me to let those thoughts pass through and not let them consume me and direct my path. This allowed me to compose with such a clear mind. Had I not gone through those moves and those shifts, I wouldn’t have had those dark thoughts to overcome which poured into this record. I think it’s always been a part of me as a songwriter. Maybe even more so now than ever.

Was it a particular challenge to distil your thoughts into so few words for this record or was it a natural byproduct of the songwriting process?

I think it fits into what we were talking about with JEDHA. We’ve learned so much about restraint and refining a loop or synth melody so much that it’s all that it needs to be, it doesn’t need to change later or have another layer added. Vocally, there was very much a sense that I didn’t need to add any more. There’s peace in this. ‘Face in a Frame’ is such a different style of writing for me; to have the same verse happen twice in a song. It felt right, like the things I was learning about composing this style of music bled over into the vocals, using them more as an instrument than a “storytelling element” in a song. I was pretty conscious of that, yeah.

You’ve stated before that you’ve been a fan of video games for a long time. Yellowcard’s music has even been featured in a number of videogames throughout the years and you’ve done a couple of gaming streams over Twitch. What are some of the games you grew up playing? Have you ever been into a game that happened to feature one of your songs?

As a lucky kid, I never wanted for anything. I wasn’t spoilt rotten, but I had a great life as a kid and I had a Nintendo. I’m an eighties kid and I was the prime age for the NES when it came out. That said, I was such an imaginative, theatrical, outdoors kind of kid that I didn’t play the Nintendo anywhere near as much as other kids around me. I loved it but it was never my instinct. I was more of a worldbuilding imaginative type of kid, acting out movies I liked and stuff. I wasn’t so much into Mario at all. I loved Kung-Fu, I loved Contra and I loved The Legend of Zelda. I didn’t get the SNES but I got a Sega Genesis and so I was obsessed with Sonic the Hedgehog. Then came the N64 with Ocarina of Time, the most iconic game of all time. I actually played it at a buddy’s house a month ago, along with Goldeneye! I still have memories of sitting on the floor with friends and playing 4-way split-screen Goldeneye. Those were the glory days! After that, I’ve been an Xbox player. We got free Xboxes. One of our songs was featured in SSX3, so they gave us consoles to be able to play it. That was when I got back into gaming after high school. The thing about gaming now is that I never got into competitive online gaming because I was on tour and we never had Internet. For a long time, we played video games all the time. We had consoles on the bus and that was a huge time passing activity. FIFA tournaments were bloodthirsty! It was so hardcore! With the pandemic, my social interaction throughout the lockdown was playing Call of Duty with other band friends. I was dragged into it because I thought I’d be terrible at it, but it became more about the hang, spending time with friends. In turn, I actually became addicted to it. I’m actually trying to ration what days of the week I let myself get on a game because I love it. I’m a PC gamer now and I think my favourite game now is Warzone. I also really got into F1 Racing. I want to get a racing rig in my new house if I can and be able to race with an ultrawide setup [laugh]. I love it! So I was a spotty, touch-and-go gamer throughout my life.

Closing off, can you name one of your favourite albums, movies and books?

I’ll go with the pandemic theme. First, Some Kind of Peace by Ólafur Arnalds has been a sanctuary for me. I still listen to it regularly. All of his work is incredible. He made the record during the pandemic and had to work with the string players at a distance and whatnot. You can really feel the solitude in the recordings.

For books, I’m actually reading Dune right now and I’m obsessed! It’s the fastest I’ve ever read a 600-page book in my life. If I’m thinking all-time favourites, I think I’d have to say The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I think I read that book on one cross-country flight. I’ve read it several times since.

For movies, I’m not allowed to say Star Wars. It can’t count. I’m going to go with what I think is one of the greatest feats of filmmaking in History. I’m much more of a film person than a book person. I think the greatest film is Schindler’s List. I just can’t think of a film that carries more weight and is more beautifully shot. It perfectly encompasses everything a film is supposed to do. It’s heartbreaking, it’s funny, it’s beautiful… the script is incredible and the score is unbelievable.

Everything Except Desire is out now on all streaming platforms.

With its action-packed tracks blending nostalgic Synthwave vibes with a healthy balance of modern touches borrowed from EDM and Dubstep, Odyssey by Lost Engineer has hit the retrowave scene with the unmistakable flair of a seasoned producer.

Every track flows impeccably with an irresistible momentum and will dazzle you with its immersive sound design and slick dance grooves.

If this first album is anything to go by, it’s that young producer Maxim Shipp from Saratov Russia has a bright musical future ahead of him.

Favorite tracks : Vaquum, Equinox

Lost Engineer ‘Odyssey’ is out now on Spotify and Bandcamp

Out now via Innerworks records for the digital release and NRW for the physical, this EP is a fantastic offshoot of the Tonebox sound.  The last full length we heard from Tonebox was the astounding “Cloud Highway” back in 2019. “Cloud Highway” was filled with dark basslines and lush textures, but it was still distinctly synthwave in many respects.

With “Last Encryption,” if you’ll permit the pun—the tone has changed.

Distinctly darker and more beat-oriented, at times “Last Encryption” feels almost more like 90’s influenced bass music than the traditional sci-fi influence darksynth we heard from Tonebox in “Cloud Highway” and “Nocturn.” Replete with stunningly devilish and HEAVY deep reese basslines more commonly used in bass genres like wave, dubstep, bass house, and drum and bass. Tracks from “Last Encryption” would be a perfect fit for those underground bondage club scenes that always seemed to crop up in 90’s movies like ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Blade.’

In spite of the bass overtones though, “Last Encryption” is still chock-full of absolutely radical synth leads… but they all feel distinctly 90s—at least to this humble editor. And of course – as you might have guessed from Tonebox mastering many NRW releases – the mix & master here is perfect. Not an easy feat for bass music! This all adds together to make “Last Encryption” an absolutely bonkers release perfectly suited to the club. It’s an interesting new direction and one that works very well with Tonebox’s already-cultivated sound.

Grab a listen here!

Wayfloe is a Montréal duo comprised of Alex Farway and Dylan Aiden. They’ve released a few singles here and there, but “Ragnarok” is the first EP we’ve seen from them since their “Neon  West Zero” dropped last year. It appears to be well worth the wait, as “Ragnarok” is an absolute ground-pounder filled with some of the most fierce uptempo synth tracks we’ve ever heard from the duo!

This EP bridges the gap between EDM and synthwave, at times even feeling a bit reminiscent of dubstep with actually serviceable melodies and basslines. It’s a fantastic mix, and frankly I’m suprised we haven’t heard more in the way of synyhwave or darksynth styled as actual dance music. Filling in the gap are the two enormous remixes from Pylot and Tokyo Rose. The Pylot ‘Ragnarok’ remix feels more like a contemporary synthwave with  Pylot’s signature complex melodies, and the Tokyo Rose ‘Winchester’ remix fires off  even further into dubstep territory (maybe he really is transitioning after all!)

Along with the release, Wayfloe dropped a full 45 minute virutal show via the NRW youtube channel, which really expands upon the EP’s sounds. It’s a fantastic companion to the official tracks – check it out below!

Sporting a gorgeous piece of artwork by Maria Mendes, the album holds a dazzling lineup of fellow collaborators including Volkor X, Power Nerd, Dan Terminus (Credited as Mathusalemherod), and Théo Begue from prog metal band Hypno5e just to name just a few. Furthermore, the artist has announced that an online release party will be held on December 3^rd to celebrate the occasion.

‘Carbon Killer is immensely delighted to FINALLY present to you the result of more than a year of studio work. Here comes the very first studio album from what is, in the other hand, one of the very most touring Synthwave band out there. It was a long and hard process to write this music, and the damn pandemic crisis would like to steal a proper release party from us ? Hell no ! Let’s create something else, something online, and party together until we release the album at midnight ! There may be some gifts involved during this event ! Be ready for an evening of randomness, surprises, music and…videogames…!’

Get ready for a thrill ride, for the Carbon Killer is loose, on the prowl and heading your way!

Neon Sign by CARBON KILLER

The Carbon Killer VR Sun Online Release Party begins at 8pm (GMT+1)
Tune in and RSVP to the official Facebook Event

Be sure to follow Carbon Killer on Facebook and Bandcamp for the latest news updates and music.

However, in spite of the name and sound being somewhat derivative – there is a lot  to love in “V​.​H​.​S. Volcanic / Harmonic / Sounds!”  Complex IDM beats overlap interesting synths that meld together and contrast to create some really fantastic tracks.

In fact, listening further, one can hear where “V​.​H​.​S. Volcanic / Harmonic / Sounds” actually take a lot of cues from Com Truise – but then branches out and creates something new, sounding a bit more influenced by traditional electronic dance music, and here the album truly begins to shine. Other moments feel more like traditional synthwave as well – an aesthetic that Com Truise himself predates.

Overall,  “V​.​H​.​S. Volcanic / Harmonic / Sounds” is an interesting mix of genres and a decent first showing for Buspin Jieber. It feels a bit derivative – sure – but underneath that is a decent sound waiting to escape and we’re interested to hear what he has in store for us in the future!

Listen to “V​.​H​.​S. Volcanic / Harmonic / Sounds” Here

Sn

How’re things? What’ve you been jamming on your way here?

It’s funny you ask that, because I was talking about that on the way here. I cannot listen to music anymore; I’ve managed to ruin music for myself [laugh]. When I listen to music, it’s “research” now. When I hear a really good song, I’m like “Goddamn it. How do I top that?”, and if I listen to a really bad song I just go “ugh, why is this popular?!”. If I listen to some of my own music I get frustrated at the production. So 99% of the time, I actually listen to podcasts now [laughs], and while doing that there’s another part of my brain that’s composing music. I start thinking about song progressions and somehow find a way to link it back to the subject I’m hearing about in the podcast. It’s like I always say: a butcher doesn’t go home to eat steak. Your vocation is rarely your hobby.

Is this a recent thing or has it somehow always been this way?

I think the more seriously I start thinking about music and where to take it into new, interesting, fresh places, the more I feel the need to compartmentalise it and keep it in a specific pocket of time in my day. It keeps it focused, it makes it a ‘craft’ rather than a hobby. Besides, we’ve all been inundated music. Everyone has a band right now and there are too many things to listen to. If I can get on Spotify, that means everyone can get on Spotify, and there’s no quality control, so you have to sift through a lot of bad music to get to the good stuff that will inspire you. I try to really curate and moderate what I listen to, and how much. Even when I find a song that’s super inspiring, I actually limit myself to limit to it once every two days, otherwise you get “numb” to what makes the song magical. When I listen to it, it just pops out more and it doesn’t get boring as quickly, because that tends to happen a lot.

The main acts you play alongside on tour and in festivals are generally labelled as Synthwave. Does this heavy exposure to this one style and aestheti c hinder your ability to find this space to develop your own distinct identity?

Sort of. But the thing is that I’m so pathologically stubborn that there’s absolutely no way that I can get “persuaded” to switch lanes. At the end of the day, I want to make the music that I want to make, and I really don’t care if it sells or not. That’s why I haven’t really dipped my toes in Synthwave. I don’t really “gel” with the sound that much. My references just seem to be on a very different trajectory from most of Synthwave. Not better, just different. So I never really feel threatened by being too much “in contact” with the scene. If anything, it just confirms in my mind that I’m just weird, that I listen to weird shit and make weird decisions in music. Most of my albums have orchestral overtures, and I had a manager for a very brief time and he wasn’t too sure about that decision, but his going against the idea made me really want to do it! [laughs] If you don’t want me to do it, I’ll do it twice over! If you tell me to make more Synthwave like ‘Pompey Pirate’, I’m going to make a polka album, just to fuck with you! It’s going to bite me in the ass eventually! [laughs] But that’s what you do to keep it adventurous.  As a musician, when you’re writing, you want to be in the unknown. If you have the same basic Synthwave sounds and samples you’re going to make the same song again and again. It will sell in the circuit, but circuits all live and die. Songs are supposed to go on further than that.

Whether we were born in the eighties or not, everyone has a different perspective on what the Eighties and Nineties felt like and what aspect of pop culture left the biggest impression on them. Is there anything you’d like to see more of in this Retro and Synthwave scene?

That’s a really good question! It’s one that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I think Synthwave is verging on becoming Hair Metal at this point if you know what I mean. I really like Hair Metal, actually, but there was a point where there were too many imitators. Sure, you had Guns N’ Roses, but you also had Ratt or …

… or Stryper!

Stryper! Oh God! A shiver went down my spine when you said that! [Laugh] You had a lot knock-offs that were really bad, but they also had the same producers and the same gear. It was just a bloated mess of an industry. The only thing that killed it was Nirvana.

My problem about the Eighties resurgence – which has sort of come and gone at this point, as we’ve moved on to the Nineties resurgence – is that it made people cling on to a romanticised version of the Eighties. People keep repeating “We want the Eighties back!”, and all I’m thinking is “Alright, guys! You got the Eighties back!”. Instead of Reagan we have Trump, the economy is down the shitter except for the 1% who’s having a great time, we’re out here asking who’s the most coked out and who’s got the weirdest fashion sense… It’s the Eighties again! Music is all about decadence. Trap is no different than hair metal! It’s all about opulence. All the signifiers of late-stage capitalism are still here. It’s not only in Synthwave. We wanted to re-live the Eighties because as kids we were pandered to. We were being raised at that time and we thought the Eighties signified safety, but the decade had a big, dark undercurrent, economically and culturally. It was shit back then, except for the rich people!

So you’re saying that you want a grittier, more grounded representation of the Eighties?

I listen to a lot of stuff that has a lot of weird, edgy lyrics or album covers, but I think that at this point in time artists have a moral responsibility to put out shit that either gently guides people towards something with meaning. They shouldn’t be irresponsible with the message they’re putting out. If all you’re putting out is “my dick is three miles wide” and “everything is neon and everything is great!”, you’re pretty much feeding opium at that point.
I could’ve gone full steam with a thematic soundtrack to all of these things, but I really needed to have songs like ‘Trapped in America’, which is basically claustrophobia. It’s about being trapped in this economic system that follows you even outside of America. What is popular in the US will be popular in the rest of the world, unfortunately, or fortunately. Everything is a butterfly effect. Musicians are a cultural frontline for what you should be putting out there.
I think pandering has become a point of desperation for big brands at this point. The whole Marvel Cinematic Universe is based on pandering rather than making movies that piss you off for a good reason. The best films I’ve seen lately are Mother! And Hereditary. Those movies will give you a panic attack if you truly understand what they’re telling you. I was in pieces by the end of Mother!, I was balling my eyes out. On the other hand, movies like Infinity War are straight-up heroin.

What about the new Star Wars trilogy? On one hand, The Force Awakens was criticized for pandering too much to its audience, whilst The Last Jedi got slammed for taking too many liberties.

What’s funny is that I went to watch The Last Jedi with my best friend – we were both huge Star Wars fans back in the day – and we thought it was really fun! I thought it was a little bit weird that Luke died without us noticing too much, but other than that I thought it was great! I posted on my social media about how I thought it was a good movie when I got back, and suddenly a truck full of shit unloaded on my feed. People were like “No, no! This is why your childhood was raped. This is why this is bad and everything is ruined for everyone”. What movie did they watch? I believe that’s just a consequence of where we are with the Internet. We weren’t ready for the Internet. It’s the big tragedy. I would be nobody without the Internet, I made my name with the Internet and yet I would give it all away if it meant that people would be sane again. They just don’t know how to handle it. I grew up at age without the Internet, without cell-phones, so I learned how to live and have fun without all of that. My nephew started swiping and unlocking I-Pads when he was two years old, and it’s really impressive, but what are we going to do when we don’t have it.

It’s the most natural thing in the world if you grow up with that technology. You could even argue that phones have become an extension of our body.

The worst part is that it’s an extension of their opinion. People get their opinions online and the more people yell, the more they believe that particular opinion. Take Star Wars, for example. Maybe it’s not a bad movie. Maybe it’s just not your thing, and maybe you shouldn’t send death threats to people.

Given that there’s this catering towards instant gratification, how do you position yourself with regards to expectations when writing music?

Writing an album is a bit of a long process for me. I need to get all of the shit songs out of my system first [laugh], then I can start figuring out what every song needs to be about. I just can’t bring myself to sit down and write a song that’s just about everyone having fun and everything being great. There needs to be an undercurrent to everything. I have tons of sketches and ideas, and I have to sit on them until I find that connecting “link” as to what it’s about. Once I do that with every song, I need to figure out how to blend them together into a story that fits what’s come before all of the other albums and write a script. It’s a very articulated, intense process to tie everything in together.

Last we heard, you were about half-way done with the second part to Midnight Signals. What can we expect from this new instalment? Were both parts composed together?

Yes, that’s part of the reason why it took two years to make Midnight Signals. I basically wrote both albums together. I am one song away from finishing Midnight Signals II, but things can change. You sometimes find out that one song just doesn’t work anymore and you have to write a new one. This second part will basically be a ‘dark mirror’ to the first. Every song will have a counterpoint and will be connected narratively. It’ll basically be a ‘flipped’, darker and heavier version of the first album, more of a deep dive. There’s more influence from artists like Soundgarden.

Given that your releases follow the same narrative; do you have the entire storyline fleshed out or do you expand it as you go along? Has it evolved from what you had originally set out to make?

Yes to all of the above! Me and my co-director Rob O’Neill basically started with the narrative on Sunset Blood and when it came to Midnight Signals we wrote the entire mythology. We have a script for Sunset Blood and its prequel Midnight Signals. Everything connects and follows this pretty meta-narrative. ‘Freak Night’ is right at the end of Midnight Signals, so they connect that way. The interesting thing with that video is that it feels like a straightforward Eighties movie throwback, but it’s not. There are ways that the concept has branched off in many unexpected ways that I didn’t see coming. One of the recent things was the importance of Sigils. I’ve been researching and looking into the theory of practice of Chaos Magick. There meta-concept of a belief system. It’s definitely informed a lot of what we’re doing with the overall narrative. I’m letting it sit for a little bit though. Hopefully, we’ll get some more attention with the Freak Night video and get the opportunity to tell the full story. It’s super fun.

So you’re still pitching the film project as we speak.

We’re pitching it left and right like crazy, hoping to get some catches. We’re trying really hard. It’s all part of the process, really. You have to get to the point where people get really comfortable with the idea, especially the people that fund these things, as they want to make sure that people really want to see it. The more attention we get from our videos; the more chances we have to tell the whole story. Otherwise, we have other options to tell the story. We could go another way, whether it be with comics or with a video game … Whatever helps us tell the story. That’s what matters.

This reminds me of an interview I did with Coheed & Cambria. The singer is based in Brooklyn as well and he’s been putting out comics for the whole Sci-Fi saga he’s created with the band. They’ve been trying to get a feature film project off the ground for a few years now but it looks like they’re facing a tough road.

It’s hard to invest in new intellectual property nowadays. They want the remakes and they want the sequels. It doesn’t make any financial sense to them so I’m not going to blame them, because it’s their money. On the other hand, this goes back to what I was saying earlier. People need to push themselves to look for more adventurous things rather than get the same old placebo and stick with a genre or whatever you’re used to. It’s good to do something that will piss you off or make you feel weird. It’s a good thing.

Open access to music and film has unfortunately led to tighter budgets and thus tighter ‘risk management’ for film and music.

That’s exactly what it is. They will market things that they know will make money for them. I go out of my way to find weird Indie Horror movies and I usually have to dig through articles, podcasts or Reddit threads to find good recommendations. I’m not going to get it from what’s being advertised to me, that’s for sure. It’s the same with music, too. It’s a shame. It used to be blogs that people read daily, but now it’s just Youtube and Spotify. That’s how you get the maximum advertisement. The devaluing of all art-forms really is biting us in the ass. It’s not like we didn’t see it coming, but this is where we are now. We can’t get any original ideas off the ground. We still do it though. That’s why I had the big graffiti in the ‘Interspace’ music video that said ‘We will still be here’. I have a day job and I’m clearly not going to be Daft Punk anytime soon, but I really don’t care. I’m still going to make the music because I’ll go crazy if I don’t. I need it. If people like it, that’s amazing, but if they don’t that’s okay too. God knows there are other bands they can listen to [laugh].

So how did you meet Rob O’ Neill, and how did you know that you’d be able to pull this ambitious project together?

That’s easy, he was my teacher in School, back when I was getting my Master’s degree in VFX. He taught scripting and coding for 3D. I’ve always struggled with trying to find out what I want to do for a living. I didn’t know if I wanted to be a filmmaker or a musician or do some job that actually pays [laugh], and he was the one that made me realize that I could be all of those things. You can actually have a mathematical brain and do art. His future wife was the assistant chairperson in the department I was in at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. We really connected and I ended up helping him do a bunch of research. He gave me the time and space to sit in a corner and code and come up with cool stuff. He also ended up giving me my Green card and my first job.

I was making wildly different music to Starcadian before that. I started working on the first song while I was working at his company. Eventually, we moved on to different companies, but one day he texted me saying “Dude, I got a cockpit!”. He works at Dreamworks in L.A. now, and he got a cockpit for 200 bucks. So we started working on a video together. We came up with half of the mythology of Starcadian real fast to justify using this cockpit. This was before Sunset Blood. ‘HE^RT’ was just a single. To this day, Rob has been the star traveller guy with the helmet in every video.

I stole time in my company’s render farm to render all of the 3D I had to do for the video, overnight. I snuck in, edited it and rendered everything on their systems. It was so fun and so intuitive. Whenever one of us gets stuck on something, the other person fills in and finds a solution. It’s a very organic back-and-forth. It’s a very fertile relationship with regards to where to go, visually, how to branch things out or pivot stuff if we don’t have the money, which happens all of the time.
We were chased by cops whilst shooting ‘Chinatown’. Apparently, you need a permit to film for everything. The live show in ‘Chinatown’ happens at the back of a diner. We had no idea until we showed up. So I had to digitally add dozens of people to make it look better. We’re both pretty good at staying on our toes and flipping ideas.

Given that the visuals and the music are so closely related, is there a specific order in which you work on each, or are there any back-and-forth re-adjustments that happen?

Usually, it stems from the music. For ‘Freak Night’, Iconoclasm – who did the cover for Saturdaze and is the creative director for a lot of our stuff – had the idea for this monster prom. I thought it was really cool so we went for it. ‘Freak Night’ might have been written because of that idea that she put in my brain. We were building monsters and we were getting ready to go, but then someone sent me the video to ‘Pressure’ by Muse, which features monsters at a prom. I just remember walking through union square and just losing it. I was thinking “Oh my God, we have to cancel the pre-production!”. Luckily, Rob told me to calm down and suggested the idea of it being an underground club rather than a prom.
Usually, I do write the music with some ideas in mind, so I try to put the concept for every song in the song already, to have a starting point. When you’re DIY, one of the main things is that you make sure you film videos according to what you can afford to shoot in. If you have a cockpit, you film a spaceship. If you have a warehouse, you film a nightclub.

Alright, on to my closing question: can you name one of your favourite albums, movies and books?

Sebastian’s Total. It’s one of those things that’s so perfect and well done that I hate it. There’s no way anyone can touch that album. I think it’s a modern masterpiece. The only thing I’m annoyed by is that he didn’t include a song called ‘Threnody’ on it. It’s a 13-minute song which includes this sample from Penderecki. If he played that song in a club, no one would stick around, but on the thirteenth minute the track just drops like a classic Sebastian beat drop and it’s magical! That’s the only thing I can think about to say about Total.
Film-wise, I would say Mother. It’s one of the films that shook me the most, lately. Besides that, there’s Labyrinth [laughs].
Book-wise, I was a pretty big fan of The Thief of Always by Clive Barker. That’s a really great book. It’s a pretty glib answer though, so I will also add Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic. It’s a really great book. It’s a very heavy book, it can be hard to understand sometimes [laugh]. I appreciate reading what people think about it. It helps you realize how much of an optical illusion perspective is. It makes you look and think about things a different way. At this point, I can’t even read fictional books because I’m trying to focus on my own stuff. So I mostly read non-fiction or philosophical stuff like that to keep me interested.

Special thanks to Anthony and Jet Set Trash for helping make this Interview happen. Get well soon, Zak!

Live Photos taken at Retro Synth Fury 2019.