WA?STE’s ‘xan 1’ drowns in the distorted reality of internalising external systems by recreating these technological filters in music

, 4 April 2019
video

WA?STE released EP Living Demons via Quantum Natives on March 27, with a video for track ‘xan 1’ premiering on AQNB today. The Tokyo-based producer released the Hollow Vessel EP via Shanghai-based label Genome6.66Mbp in 2017, followed by a self-released EP last month called இ;ℌ𝔢𝔯𝔢𝔡𝔦𝔱𝔞𝔰 𝔄𝔠𝔦𝔡𝔲𝔰_| ̄|○ .

The four tracks of Living Demons include titles like ‘f.4ℹ︎.t.h’, ‘cite, borrow’ and ‘ecstatic passage’, which become a wind tunnel of layered, glitched and sampled turbulence; an overloading of data, information and its interpretation in audio atmospherics. The EP download comes accompanied by a zine with a text and its various translations into Japanese, Russian, Korean, Chinese and AI English credited to various human and non-human forms, including Felix Idle, Oleg Kizeev, Sorim Byeon, Pipe Yu and Google Translate. It opens, “I want to be obedient to the memory and experience like the RAM of a personal computer that seems to be drowned in my daily life.” The video for ‘xan 1’, meanwhile, features these alphabets and their configurations transposed on images of natural and urban spaces that are sequentially oversaturated, pixelated and framed, in parallel to the blown out and distorted audio collage of the music.**

WA?STE’s Living Demons EP via Quantum Natives on March 27, 2019.