Hunt out misguided angelssearch in vain amongst the ruinsa message, show you know how i feel?nothing stays the same
There’s a peculiar shimmer to the ruins of the early ’90s industrial age, an afterimage burned into the eyes of those who once danced among the machines. Cyberaktif’s Nothing Stays was one of those moments: a gleaming monolith of circuitry and sorrow, born from the fevered imaginations of cEvin Key and Dwayne R. Goettel—both architects of Skinny Puppy’s menacing grandeur—and Bill Leeb, who had left Skinny Puppy years earlier to forge his own empire with Front Line Assembly. Together, they bridged the two worlds of electro-industrial and EBM, fusing Puppy’s dystopian menace with FLA’s mechanized precision. The track was a ghostly transmission from a collapsing system, a hymn to entropy that somehow pulsed with life. Its refrain, “nothing stays the same,” wasn’t a lament so much as an acknowledgment of the beautiful inevitability of decay.
Three decades later, that refrain resurfaces like a memory carried on cold steel wind. NØIR vs Silver Walks resurrects the track not as a nostalgic relic but as a séance—a digital invocation of the era Key, Goettel, and Leeb helped define. Daniel McCullough (Silver Walks) and Athan Maroulis (NØIR) reimagine Nothing Stays for an age where collapse has gone wireless, its ghosts flickering through fiber optics instead of tape. The collaboration itself mirrors the fractured nature of modern creation: no one involved ever met in person. Vocals were tracked in New York, Berlin, and Pennsylvania; the mix pulsed through Los Angeles; the master finalized in Madison. Yet across this digital distance, the song coheres—its pulse hypnotic, its melancholy timeless.
Athan’s voice, smooth as polished chrome and steeped in melancholy, feels like the medium through which the séance speaks—channeling the weariness of one who’s watched empires, both digital and personal, dissolve into static. Valentina Veil (VV & The Void) drifts through the mix like an apparition, her spectral harmonies rising between the beats, their Berlin echo underscoring the song’s borderless, disembodied nature. Daniel McCullough’s programming anchors it all: a latticework of cold precision and emotional gravity. The result hums with the pulse of machines yet aches with something heartbreakingly human beneath—proof that even ghosts can still dance.
There’s a Gatsby-like quality to Nothing Stays; a yearning for permanence in a world that insists on dissolving. The machines, like the lights across the bay, flicker and fade, yet we keep reaching for them. The remixes by S Y Z Y G Y X, genCAB, and KLACK push the song’s structure toward the club and the cosmos, but its core remains faithful to the Wax Trax! legacy: elegant, mechanical despair with a danceable heartbeat. Released via Distortion Productions, this Nothing Stays reminds us that even in ruin, the signal endures—glitching, gasping, and impossibly alive.
Listen to Nothing Stays below and order the EP here.
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