“Described by one youtube connoisseur as CIA torture music, but I'm pretty sure they're wrong.”
Synthesizers hum and new wave pulses ignite: SOFT RIOT's Crux channels Fad Gadget and early Simple Minds through minimalist darkwave and EBM, while The Mystic Underground's We Could Be Fugitives cranks the tempo to dancefloor-ferocity, a clarion call to "take your lover by the hand and run." Montreal's Glass Dolls brings bedroom pop post-punk meditations on love and grief, while Kernfamilie II merges retro-futurism and dystopian soundscapes into a machine-crafted cautionary tale. Chris of Wilderness's Weeks Like Worms rounds things out with paranoid, panopticon-poking electronics — dense, adventurous, and resolutely off-kilter.