TR/ST's "Performance" & US Tour with Provoker: Oct 31 - Nov 23 | Modernwav Festival at Music Box San Diego: Nov 22 - 23

While a relatively narrow aspect of the bandwidth of music within the goth and early electro-industrial sounds of the 1980s and 1990s, darkwave and synthwave express novel variations and nuance to its particulars. An overview of these concurrent, interrelated, and offshoot genres, and their contemporary revival was mapped by Vice in their, "A Brief History of Musical Waves from New to Next". Compilations like the now-classic, “The Minimal Wave Tapes: Volume One” focused on the coldwave and minimal wave strains, while the recent “No Songs Tomorrow: Darkwave, Ethereal Rock, and Coldwave 1981-1990”, present an all-inclusive cornucopia of variables within the subgenre. Taken together, these compilations offer an overarching map of a sound that was born of the settling dust of the tumult of post-punk's upending of the topography of rock and noise music. Utilizing technology which would become a central component of the concurrent new wave movement, these artists applied the rhythmic dance structures and synthesizer-focused songwriting to a knowingly distant, colder aesthetic. While much of the transitional state of post-punk toward new wave began to be focused around commercially-minded outsider pop, a darker undercurrent did survive. Expressed through a more uneasy, existential, often edgier and sexually charged sound than their more commercial compatriots, darkwave retained its post-punk values while utilizing the same technology, and dancier, more upbeat tempos of new wave.

Inspired by this era, and the balancing act of its particular brand of starkly minimal, angular, existential electronic dance pop of alienation and heartbreak, a new generation of producers have come to the fore, presented by The Guardian in, “‘The Body was the Drums, the Brain was the Synthesiser’: Darkwave, the Gothic Genre Lighting up Pop”. A cross-section of artists within this subgenre, Molchat Doma, The KVB, She Wants Revenge, Xeno & Oaklander, The Soft Moon, Twin Tribes, She Past Away, Drab Majesty, TR/ST, and Boy Harsher, express a spectrum of variations on an aesthetic of darkly romantic, sexually fetishistic, and imperially fatalistic thematic concerns. In describing Boy Harsher's sound as a "moving choker-collar muscle-mash" which "contains a dark power, an atavistic pull", the music press has rightly depicted the central components from which the variables pivot and deviate around. One of the more distinct deviations of the sound can be found in the fiery synthwave of 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, “Performance” brings the sound Pitchfork described as, "the sonic equivalent of a fashion show put on by depressive pill abusers; malevolent, but mightily sexy" on tour across the country with the Bay Area's Provoker. Following a date in Seattle, the tour's final destination will be at Modernwav the "Two-Day Industrial Darkwave Event in San Diego", an all-inclusive showcase of darkwave, synthwave, dark gothic and post-punk electronic club music.

Drew McDowall's "A Thread, Silvered and Trembling" & US Tour: May 31 - Jun 19

Born of the countercultural hotbed and its response to the restrictions of Margaret Thatcher's England, Jhon Balance and Peter Christohperson's music as Coil may be the most explicitly occult, and outwardly queer, of all of the British post-punk and industrial sounds of the 1980s. The origins of Coil can be found in Christopherson's contribution to the very outfit that coined the term industrial music, and the transgressive sound, art, and theater they deployed as Throbbing Gristle. Splitting from TG with the meeting of Zos Kia's Jhon Balance in 1983, Christopherson's fruitful collaborations with Balance would carve out a body of psychedelic and "sidereal" music on the fringe of post-punk and experimental culture for the next three decades. There remains no better guide to the mystic, psychedelic, rapturously unique and deeply beguiling music Jhon and Peter created over the decades of Coil's existence, and the wider British countercultural continuum, than David Keenan's "England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground". More concise compendiums tend to be on the exiguous side, but few resources bridge Coil's deep plumbing of the esoteric and the cultural milieu of the time better than Russell Cuzner's feature for The Quietus, "Serious Listeners: The Strange and Frightening World of Coil". In the following decade, by the early-1990s the duo had brought on supporting members Stephen Thrower, Drew McDowall, Ossian Brown, Danny Hyde, and William Breeze and an assimilation of UK club music and American minimalist composers into their sound. This all began with the unlikely meeting of British rave, ecstasy, and queer club culture colliding head-on with their morose, cinematic, and surrealist themes that were heard on 1991's "Love's Secret Domain".

This wildly energetic and transitional era for Coil is explored by their friend and collaborator, Stephen Thrower, in a recent and revealing interview for The Quietus, "Further Back and Faster: A Return to Coil's Love's Secret Domain". In many ways, the album acted as a primer to Coil's next step, the ill-fated "Backwards" album for the Nothing label, briefed in the "Trent Reznor on Coil and Nine Inch Nails" interview, and the following phase of 1996's "Black Light District: A Thousand Lights in a Darkened Room", where they began their venture into an expressly ambient and nocturnal passage. Insight into this mercurial era of their music and assimilation and perversion of then-developing sounds in British electronic music is revealed through the inner workings of their "Obscure Mechanics" in philosophical and musing interviews published in the pages of The Wire. It was through this pivotal transition of their music that the contributions of Drew McDowall and Thighpaulsandra came to the fore, on increasingly minimalist works that explored altered states of mind, ritualistic access to other realms, and ambient Moon Musick. The opening salvo of which was their "Time Machines" collaboration, which its co-author spoke on with The Quietus, "Time Machines: Drew McDowall on Coil's Drone Legacy". Journeying further with FACT on his legacy with Coil, and brief tenure with Psychic TV, McDowall has also developed a body of current recordings, reflective of the sharp edge of these tenuous times, "Industrial legend Drew McDowall on Coil and confronting Global Crisis". It is these recordings for the Dias label, in which McDowall has refined and expanded the vocabulary of the Coil collaborations heard two decades before, further enriching the pool of tonal minimalism with deeper sonic musings, and a more variegated vocabulary of haunted sonics. Most notable among these, this month he is on tour with his newest, "A Thread, Silvered and Trembling", sounding the depths of what The Wire called, "Musick, Magick and Sacred Materiality".

Boy Harsher's "Careful" & Mechanismus: Resistance at The Highline and Mercury at Machinewerks: Jun 11 - 14

Seattle goth and industrial music culture has had a number of locus points over the decades of its existence as an urban-centralized subculture in the city. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, at the apogee of the genre's ascension, clubs like Re-Bar, The Monastery, The Vogue, The Catwalk and Fenix Underground had regular nights dedicated to the bondage, fetish, leather and BDSM scenes that offered alternative lifestyles to the crass commercialism of the Reagan and later Bush eras. These were booked concurrently alongside nights specifically dedicated to post-punk, gothic rock, and industrial music and the interweaving of these two subcultures, and offered physical spaces for these like-minded communities to convene. Foremost among them was the speakeasy known as Machinewerks, which traversed the city in a series of changing locations to avoid detection by various authorities. Seeking a stable location, the speakeasy then became incorporated as a legitimate, licensed, private club. Now, decades later, there are only a few remaining goth and industrial nights in Seattle. Those that remain are at Kremwerk, The Rendezvous, Clockout Lounge, and the long-lived home for this culture, at Machinewerks, which continues on in its newest iteration as Mercury at Machinewerks. Along with these daily and weekly DJ and dance nights, there are also monthly and seasonal bookings of live music by Musicwerks and Mechanismus at the two venues of El Corazon and The Highline respectively. Mechanismus also plays host to an annual festival, largely culled specifically from the domestic United States electro-industrial and EBM styles, and what the international press is now calling Darkwave, as covered in recent features in the pages of The Guardian.

These subgenres, which came after the initial European and United Kingdom scenes of the earliest part of the decade, instead began to manifest with the technological developments of the mid-to-late 1980s. Following in the wake of techno in Detroit, the American continent saw its own electro-industrial variation on the form, harnessed largely by label's like Nettwerk and Chicago's Wax Trax! Records. Their legacy, beyond just releasing a body of music that bred the more commercially successful acts of the 1990s, like Nine Inch Nails and Prodigy, is that Wax Trax! were defined by a then-radical business model. Acting as more than just the setting of a retail record store, and label with an atypical contract process, the environment its founders created was a cultural locus of related aesthetics, sounds, values and lifestyles. This year's Mechanismus festival, titled Resistance, features a three day lineup of DJs and established names at The Highline and Mercury at Machinewerks, encompassing both of these electro-industrial and Darkwave sounds. In Resistance’s three nights of showcases, the lineup of live acts include; Clan of Xymox, Boy Harsher, Funker Vogt, Stabbing Westward, Velvet Acid Christ, and a as-yet-announced secret headliner on the second night. In the case of the foremost two acts, theirs is a relationship of early European progenitors from the 1980s, and a new American contemporary 21st century neo-gothic variation. Initially signed to the influential 4AD label four decades ago, Clan of Xymox have returned in recent years with new albums to find audiences at gothic culture events like Wave-Gotik-Treffen festival in their current home of Leipzig, Germany. This has been alongside the new generation of Darkwave artists like Molchat Doma, The KVB, TR/ST, Twin Tribes, She Past Away, and Boy Harsher. The latter releasing their "Careful" album last year on their own Nude Club Records, a sound once described as a "Moving Choker-Collar Muscle Mash", which NME's review suggests; "contains a dark power, an atavistic pull" ...and that listeners should simply, "Give in to their bad romance".