L’Avenir, the stark synth persona of ambient practitioner Jason Sloan, pares analogue electronics to their icy essence, spooling monochrome pulses and modular melancholy with the restraint of early wave minimalism. KISS OF THE WHIP, helmed by Montreal-born Tristan Victor, trades in body-moving bleakness, melding the serrated edges of EBM with a melodic undercurrent that threatens to rupture its own restraint. Their second split LP, L’Avenir | Kiss of the Whip – Split 2, sees these Baltimore-based allies dive deeper into electronic existentialism.
The accompanying videos for A.O.W. and Kaleidoscopic signal their first shared visual foray, directed and distorted entirely by Jason Sloan himself. Vintage hardware, programmed video synthesis, and analogue decay collide into a visual language that mirrors the music’s austere precision and emotional charge. Across sixty minutes of new material, the duo dig their nails into the corpse of coldwave, dragging its skeletal remains through flickering light and fractured rhythm.
A.O.W. sketches a savage tableau of mechanized warfare: smoke tangled with blood beneath crimson skies, where nature’s grace dissolves into bone and ash. Soldiers, at once architects and ashes of war, march with hollow conviction through wreckage and ruin. Despair collides with duty, as scientific advance becomes a vehicle for mass annihilation. Eerie synth pads and clipped, urgent vocals summon a state of creeping paranoia, while the militaristic visuals drive the blade deeper, confronting us with the grim paradox of progress: humanity devouring itself through endless conflict and environmental collapse.
Kaleidoscopic traces the brief shimmer of beauty before it vanishes into the void. A radiant figure dissolves, leaving behind only dust and memory, as warmth gives way to distance and doubt. Its aching refrain asks: if the story ends today, what hope remains for tomorrow? Both song and video serve as meditations on impermanence; a fragile, fractured vision of humanity and the planet in psychedelic, glitch-streaked decline.
Available April 18 on CD and digital formats, Split 2 is a vivid and immersive offering from two artists whose creative partnership continues to evolve with clarity, intensity, and deep reverence for the electronic underground.
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