Photo: Ruth Dupiereux
Dance. Think. Fight! Spain’s Abraxas is an indie outfit dwelling halfway between dark dance electronic music, philosophical reflection, socio-political activism, and musical entrepreneurship. Helmed by Damià Llorens Picó (AKA We Are Not Brothers, PanDemian and Cançoner Industrial), he combines activism with EBM, fusing a clear mission with the hypnotic music…perhaps change needs to be programmed into us through the power of sound.
The farsighted goal of Abraxas is to “shake bodies and minds by spreading messages of individual and social self-criticism.” Duality, extremes, and contradictions, inherent to the human being and capitalist society, aren’t working. The approach he has is straight-up cyberpunk: using techno as a sort of hypnosis channel to introduce modern discourse through music and a thunderous audiovisual experience. Taking a cue from MK Ultra experiments and the 24-hour news cycle, why not weaponize sound itself to brainwash the masses…into positive activism?
The intoxicating result, Dancing As An Act of Rebellion (Soil Records), is a darkwave-tinged techno collection with remixes by other darkwave electronic artists such as Geistform, SMforma, Ober Dada, HBK1, SOJ and Melting Dogmas. Its mesmerizing beats are peppered with spoken word moments and samples from political speeches and the news, damning capitalism’s enslavement by spewing phrases straight out of They Live. If you want to hear Obama’s folksy voice calling out The Orange Menace and the Age of Misinformation over sinister techno beats, your time has come. This album is a gem.
Dancing As An Act of Rebellion is out now.
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