Listen to members of the Chicago Research collective and Industrial surrealist trio, Civic Center’s “The Ground Below” LP, an album out today through American Dreams Records.
American Dreams Records is the experimental label of musician Jordan Reyes, who says “Chicago Research is Building a New Home for Industrial Music in the Midwest.”
Reyes discovered Chicago Research after seeing its founder Blake Karlson’s other project, Product KF open for French coldwave legends Trisomie 21.
Themes of Disenchantment prevail on The Ground Below, as well as the vapidity of social graces, the catch-22’s in hive mind morality, the intersection of ethics and brutality, all funneled through an industrial haze with post-punk flavors peppered throughout.
Civic Center has been gaining ground since the unveiling of their first two singles “High Beams” the album’s hissing industrial and atmospheric opener, and the experimentally drifting brutalist closer and gothic blackhole of “Pencil and Pad”.
The album is sometimes more Joy Division meets Cabaret Voltaire than Throbbing Gristle, and is a fascinating and immersive listen through and through, From “Fly on the Wall”, “What We’re Made Of”, “Prophet”, and more, this record is spacious and bleak, like emerging from a bunker into an unimaginable desolation.
Listen to The Ground Below or Order Here.
