The end of October has arrived and demarcating the spookiest time of the year Seattle shows a small abundance of opportunities to put on a cloak and dress the part. Up north at Aurora Borealis DJ JQ hosts a gothic masquerade for this season's Darkwave Mixtape, and across town DJ Coldheart will be spinning classic goth, wave and industrial at The Mercury in Retrograde. Concurrently that week at Substation, the cyberpunk inspired industrial noise and hip hop of Ho99o9 arrives to deliver one of their now perfectly season-attuned shows of bewildering noise and beats. Speaking with The Quietus, the duo makes clear their position in the world of the gloam, "Fear Smells Delicious: An Interview with Ho99o9" with NME inviting you to, "Meet the Freak-Rap Duo who Sound like your Goriest Nightmares". Within days also at Substation, the French Canadian minimal techno of Marie Davidson offers a perfect alignment with sounds from her Ninja Tune and Because Music albums, alongside the DJ set of dark, fiery synthwave from Robert Alfons' TR/ST. Initially working as a duo with Maya Postepski of Austra on a series of albums for Arts & Crafts, Alfons' project is now largely a solo enterprise. This series of changes he explored with Interview Magazine, and in conversation with the San Francisco Chronicle, "TR/ST Pushes Past Fear to Create New Atmospheric Soundscapes". Now with his new home of shared compatriots on the Dais label, his most recent “Performance” brought the sound Pitchfork described as, "the sonic equivalent of a fashion show put on by depressive pill abusers; malevolent, but mighty sexy. Beginning Alfons' series of west coast dates, he finds himself the headlining DJ at the San Francisco edition of Substance Festival. TR/ST will be framed by live sets from Cold Cave, Kontravoid, Desire, A Split Second, and other compatriots in the darkwave and electro-industrial scene. A sound presented by The Guardian in their feature, “‘The Body was the Drums, the Brain was the Synthesiser’: Darkwave, the Gothic Genre Lighting up Pop”.
