HIDE, Drug Searching Dogs, Morast, Inou Ki Endo dj-set

(US/Dais Records)

HIDE are an electronic duo based in Chicago. The pair create dark and heavy sample-based compositions using a combination of self-sourced field recordings and various pop culture and media references. Their music is textured, minimal, and powerful, giving raw vulnerability a chance to unfurl. Their work is honest, confrontational, powerful and thought-provoking.

HIDE's third album, Interior Terror (Dais Records, 2021) further abandons traditional concepts of song structure in favor of splintered rhythms and fevered, immediate release. Expanding on previous themes of autonomy and empowerment, Interior Terror addresses and questions the corporeal and immaterial body in a physical and metaphysical sense. Turning to the dread inside, reflecting on the world around us, HIDE gives voice to the power of destruction as a catalyst for hope, and to the collective experiences of those who've come before us as a wellspring of our own power. Raw vocal delivery of mantra-like prose issued forth yields a raging, plaintive wail that lulls, mocks, questions, proclaims and decries. A dearth of collected field recordings give way to more fluid arrangements while retaining a scathing urgency. The result is minimal, spacious, and jarring; a distant knocking grown into the pulse of a hypnotic dirge, drones emerge from shards of decomposed sound, bending, seething their way through your body.

The DRUG SEARCHING DOGS mark their territory by surpassing the capacities of your fav club’s PA. Drawing their inspiration from Gabber, Harsh Noise and Punk the trio blasts an amalgam of heavily distorted walls of bass, screetching highs and razor-edge vocals. With deafening barks against all oppression, the war on drugs will soon end.

Born within the melting continuum of noise and techno, Morast ventures into more abstract realms with his debut record “Drawing figures into negative space”, seeking ecstatic listening experiences in heavily overdriven rhythmical collages based on drum samples and giddy feedback-loops. Morast states: “All of the music is based on jams with a Pure Data patch that I wrote with the goal to create noisy live techno. But in the course of time, I somehow got more interested in the oddities and irregularities the patch would offer me, and started to deconstruct the initial goal of making techno.”

Conceptualized as a live project, the improvisational approach of his shows also became the modus operandi for making this record, which gives the music its immediacy, while being abstract and never sounding overly intellectual or composed, but still letting forms emerge before the backdrop of chaos.