Emerging New York-based electronic music outfit Content Blocks — Ian Campbell and Matthew Hord — features members, w ho have collaborated and participated together for years in various musical endeavors and events. Their near-decade of shared experiences crafting, programming and operating the electronic instrumentation in acclaimed industrial act Pop. 1280 has further informed their journey deeper into hardware experimentation — and their latest collaboration together shows the results of their experimentation into ambient abstractions, dance floor deconstructions, and fractured pop tropes into darker realms.
Campbell’s and Hord’s Content Blocks debut “IMDS” pairs off-kilter, repetitive and propulsive percussive patterns with glistening, reverb-soaked synths with reverb-drenched, ethereal yet disaffected vocals coming out like a feverish haze. While sonically seeming to channel Rival Consoles and Noble Rot, “IMDS” simultaneously manages to evoke the late night return home from the club with the music and the entire night reverberating in your head and soul — but the rest of the world may well be asleep.
Conceived as an audiovisual experience, “IMDS” is accompanied with a video created by the duo’s longtime collaborator Scott Kieran (ESP TV) that starts off focusing on an accelerating centrifuge interspersed with frames featuring cell death and electronic feedback and 3D imagery that orbit around a lone figure dancing or using a complicated elliptical-looking device. It’s fittingly eerie and trippy.
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