Venus Ex Machina signals the end of summerseason with a wholehearted plunge through speculative electronicdevices.
“This set of rhythms and shadows efforts to conjure an fictional location, of which no trace stays, otherthan for the flicker of fading memory,” composes Nontokozo F. Sihwa, the author and manufacturer who makes music as Venus Ex Machina. Trained as a mathematician, Sihwa checksout styles of futurism, post-humanism and the phenomenology of radio-related interaction through sonic accuracy, developing instruments, algorithms and oscillations that gesture towards and relocation through the Black musical customs of techno, electro and speculative music. Conceiving of efficiency and her function as entertainer as a practice of storytelling, Sihwa comprehends noise as a language of feeling, a indicates of evocation and invocation. “The location might be gone, yet you continue in lookingfor it, thinking in the power of dream to redeem you from factor,” she states of the area her mix is magnified from. “A sweaty night below a freeway, someplace. The end of summerseason. A rejection to offer up.”
This rejection to offer up takes the kind of a wholehearted plunge through the bleeding edge of progressive electronic music, puttingtogether some of the secret figures from synergistic speculative scenes that map a discussion inbetween the UnitedStates, Europe and the UK, as well as Uganda, Kenya, Mexico, Vietnam, Japan, Iran and South Africa. Finding typical ground in Erase Me’s scary OST and FRKTL’s natural rework of Aho Ssan’s artificial jazz, the fried hardware electronicdevices of B. Rupp and the virtuosic device drumming of Speaker Music, or the quotidian digital drum experiments of Gooooose and the Afrofuturist electro improv of Gladstone Deluxe, Sihwa conjures a merging point that unfurls from the fictional, however coalesces into a extremely real and important sonic network, a sonic language shared by like minds and kindred spirits.
You can discover Venus Ex Machina on Instagram and Bandcamp.
Tracklist:
Erase Me – ‘Hypnosis’
Aho Ssan – ‘Simulacrum I (FRKTL Remix)’
Scotch Rolex – ‘U.T.B. 88’
Nick León – ‘Igneous Drums’
B. Rupp – ‘124055’
Speaker Music – ‘Feenin’
Bridget Ferril