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Thursday, September 30, 2021
BLOODYMINDED : PHASES 2CD
Friday, September 10, 2021
Tuesday, August 10, 2021
Mark Solotroff Video Premiere
 Return To Pleasure (Body Into Voice) Reposting from Earsplit PR Bloodyminded and Anatomy Of Habit founder, electronic music veteran, artist, multi-instrumentalist, and all around noise mastermind MARK SOLOTROFF is pleased to premiere his latest video, “Return To Pleasure (Body Into Voice),” today via CVLT Nation. The track comes off SOLOTROFF’s Not Everybody Makes It full-length, released independently last month. Recorded and mixed by SOLOTROFF during April and May of 2021 and mastered by Collin Jordan at The Boiler Room in May in 2021, Not Everybody Makes It is SOLOTROFF’s most restrained and controlled synth recording to date. While he anticipated creating a hybrid of more primitive and aggressive sounds balanced by more subtle ambient textures, by the time he finished mixing the six new songs — each one exactly ten-minutes in length — he realized that he had made significant strides in evolving his recent style. Not Everybody Makes It functions as a sonic elegy to the countless losses that so many of us have suffered over the last year and in the recent past, and its shimmering and crumbling frequencies and textures enter into a tense balancing act with elusive melodies that slowly drown in and then emerge from the shifting and eroding dronescapes. Offers SOLOTROFF of the solemn video, “It’s been difficult to view the devastating wildfires on the West Coast, over the last several years, and to not be moved by the widespread damage that they cause. During my last trip to Los Angeles, a friend who lives there pointed out vast stretches of scorched landscape as we drove along the expressway in his car, not all that far from Downtown, where I was staying. I’ve also lived through a fire in a former home in Chicago. There’s nothing like being woken up very early on a Sunday morning by neighbors pounding on your door, only to realize that half of your building is in flames. The distinct smell remained with me for a long time. Fire is a frightening but fascinating thing to see and to hear and I appreciate how it becomes very abstract, as you focus deeper on the dancing flames. “‘Dancing,’ what a poetic word we use! Inspired by the legacy of experimental filmmakers who have been based in Chicago, from László Moholy-Nagy to Stan Brakhage, and Owen Land (who was actually my cousin; a progressively distant one, as far as my family history goes) to Lisa Slodki (AKA Noise Crush, whose work was exhibited by the Museum Of Contemporary Art and who collaborates with my bandmate Isidro Reyes and me, when we perform as The Fortieth Day), I created this abstract meditation on the destructive power of fire.” View MARK SOLOTROFF’s “Return To Pleasure (Body Into Voice),” now playing at CVLT Nation, at THIS LOCATION.
Not Everybody Makes It is available on CD, in a four-panel digipak featuring SOLOTROFF’s photography, and on all major digital platforms. Find orders via Bandcamp HERE or iTunes/Apple Music HERE where the record can be streamed in full. MARK SOLOTROFF‘s artwork and music focuses on several related key themes, including how cities develop, both organically and through organized planning, how the human body navigates urban environments, and how people navigate and interact with each other, particularly in an age of alienation caused by severe digital fragmentation. In the music world, SOLOTROFF is best known as the vocalist of both the doom band Anatomy Of Habit and the heavy electronic band Bloodyminded, and as the founder of the early post-industrial band Intrinsic Action. He also has a more than thirty-five-year history playing analog synthesizer. His synth work has been at the core of Bloodyminded and Intrinsic Action, and he recorded and released one-hundred hours of lo-fi analog synth music under the name Super Eight Loop, which he recently digitized and remastered. He is part of the dark-synth group Nightmares, which released a new album in early 2020, as well as the post-industrial trio, Ensemble Sacrés Garçons, which released their first new album in over twenty-five years, in early 2021. SOLOTROFF has also collaborated with and contributed synth and/or vocals to numerous bands, ranging from a four-year role in Wrekmeister Harmonies, to live appearances and/or studio recordings with diverse electronic, experimental, and metal bands, including The Atlas Moth, Brutal Truth, Consumer Electronics, Indian, Locrian, Plague Bringer, Sigillum S, and The Sodality. In late 2019, SOLOTROFF‘s synth was included on new releases by Azar Swan (“The Hissing Crane” on Primal Architecture) and The Body (“Remixed” on Thrill Jockey), and in 2020, he created remixes, augmented with his synth, for Statiqbloom (“Asphyxia Remixed” on Synthicide) and Snow Burial (“Painting The Streets With Our Blood”).
“SOLOTROFF focuses upon emotional states, as through chronicling a mix of anxiety and mourning. There’s space to immerse within the morose sounds that SOLOTROFF presents… it’s quietly surreal.” Captured Howls “Themes of isolation have been prevalent in SOLOTROFF‘s recent work, with a series of eight tapes in the past few years (compiled earlier this year onto three 2CD volumes as the Strategic Planning series), but while those captured a sense of urban loneliness and anomie, Not Everybody Makes It is more personal and introspective. Besides the intentional imagery conveyed by the title, the hushed volumes and pseudo-melodies (not something often associated with his work) lock on to this sense of loneliness and despair.” – Brainwashed “SOLOTROFF’s ear for sound is more unique than most. A listen to this record may inspire a new way of thinking and appreciating noise; a ponder into the authenticity of sound regarding what we consider to be music.” – Distorted Sound “This collection was in part SOLOTROFF’s response to the emergence of the pandemic last year, a set of circumstances that intensified the significance of the themes with which his work is usually concerned – how people navigate and interact with each other, particularly in an age of alienation caused by severe digital fragmentation, how cities develop and how the human body navigates urban environments. Taking this into account the layers of stillness, movement, fragility, ambivalence, menace, and unease wrapped in the strata of glassy, metallic drone make sense. This is a very beautiful yet disquieting collection that SOLOTROFF has created, perfect for our times.” – The Sleeping Shaman “Those who like their ambient music to be dark, dystopian, and minimalist in nature should have a very good chance of finding this album to be quite the rewarding experience.” – The Viking In The Wilderness |
Friday, July 30, 2021
MARK SOLOTROFF: Not Everybody Makes It Full-Length From Bloodyminded / Anatomy Of Habit Founder Out Now And Streaming!
“SOLOTROFF shapes sound into bite-size meditations that thread the needle between representing anxiety and soothing it…” – Chicago Reader
Not Everybody Makes It, the latest solo album from Bloodyminded and Anatomy Of Habit founder, electronic music veteran, artist, multi-instrumentalist, and all around noise mastermind MARK SOLOTROFF is out today!
Recorded and mixed by SOLOTROFF during April and May of 2021 and mastered by Collin Jordan at The Boiler Room in May in 2021, Not Everybody Makes It is SOLOTROFF’s most restrained and controlled synth recording to date. While he anticipated creating a hybrid of more primitive and aggressive sounds balanced by more subtle ambient textures, by the time he finished mixing the six new songs — each one exactly ten-minutes in length — he realized that he had made significant strides in evolving his recent style. Not Everybody Makes It functions as a sonic elegy to the countless losses that so many of us have suffered over the last year and in the recent past, and its shimmering and crumbling frequencies and textures enter into a tense balancing act with elusive melodies that slowly drown in and then emerge from the shifting and eroding dronescapes.
Stream Not Everybody Makes It in its entirety at THIS LOCATION.
View MARK SOLOTROFF’s recently released video for “Charged Matter (The Problem From The Inside)” HERE.
Not Everybody Makes It will be available on CD, in a four-panel digipak featuring SOLOTROFF’s photography, and on all major digital platforms. Find orders via Bandcamp HERE or iTunes/Apple Music HERE.
MARK SOLOTROFF’s artwork and music focuses on several related key themes, including how cities develop, both organically and through organized planning, how the human body navigates urban environments, and how people navigate and interact with each other, particularly in an age of alienation caused by severe digital fragmentation.
In the music world, SOLOTROFF is best known as the vocalist of both the doom band Anatomy Of Habit and the heavy electronic band Bloodyminded, and as the founder of the early post-industrial band Intrinsic Action. He also has a more than thirty-five-year history playing analog synthesizer. His synth work has been at the core of Bloodyminded and Intrinsic Action, and he recorded and released one-hundred hours of lo-fi analog synth music under the name Super Eight Loop, which he recently digitized and remastered. He is part of the dark-synth group Nightmares, which released a new album in early 2020, as well as the post-industrial trio, Ensemble Sacrés Garçons, which released their first new album in over twenty-five years, in early 2021.
SOLOTROFF has also collaborated with and contributed synth and/or vocals to numerous bands, ranging from a four-year role in Wrekmeister Harmonies, to live appearances and/or studio recordings with diverse electronic, experimental, and metal bands, including The Atlas Moth, Brutal Truth, Consumer Electronics, Indian, Locrian, Plague Bringer, Sigillum S, and The Sodality. In late 2019, SOLOTROFF‘s synth was included on new releases by Azar Swan (“The Hissing Crane” on Primal Architecture) and The Body (“Remixed” on Thrill Jockey), and in 2020, he created remixes, augmented with his synth, for Statiqbloom (“Asphyxia Remixed” on Synthicide) and Snow Burial (“Painting The Streets With Our Blood”).
“…Not Everybody Makes It is somber and deliberately restrained, meant to be played at a volume that allows the ambient sounds of the listener’s home to slip through… SOLOTROFF shapes sound into bite-size meditations that thread the needle between representing anxiety and soothing it. Much of his work is confrontational and violent, but he’s also a master of the elegiac (such as in Anatomy Of Habit), and that’s on full display throughout Not Everybody Makes It. Like much of the music I’ve heard from the past year and a half, its emotional perimeter has been shaped in part by solitude, grief, and worry… a beautiful, subtle record that will reward repeated listenings. – Chicago Reader
“SOLOTROFF focuses upon emotional states, as through chronicling a mix of anxiety and mourning. There’s space to immerse within the morose sounds that SOLOTROFF presents… it’s quietly surreal.” Captured Howls
“Themes of isolation have been prevalent in SOLOTROFF‘s recent work, with a series of eight tapes in the past few years (compiled earlier this year onto three 2CD volumes as the Strategic Planning series), but while those captured a sense of urban loneliness and anomie, Not Everybody Makes It is more personal and introspective. Besides the intentional imagery conveyed by the title, the hushed volumes and pseudo-melodies (not something often associated with his work) lock on to this sense of loneliness and despair.” – Brainwashed
“This collection was in part SOLOTROFF’s response to the emergence of the pandemic last year, a set of circumstances that intensified the significance of the themes with which his work is usually concerned – how people navigate and interact with each other, particularly in an age of alienation caused by severe digital fragmentation, how cities develop and how the human body navigates urban environments. Taking this into account the layers of stillness, movement, fragility, ambivalence, menace, and unease wrapped in the strata of glassy, metallic drone make sense. This is a very beautiful yet disquieting collection that SOLOTROFF has created, perfect for our times.” – The Sleeping Shaman
For MARK SOLOTROFF coverage contact liz@earsplitcompound.com.
http://marksolotroff.com
http://www.facebook.com/solotroff
http://www.instagram.com/marksolotroff
http://marksolotroff.bandcamp.com/
Thursday, July 29, 2021
The Sleeping Shaman on Not Everybody Makes It
Review: Mark Solotroff ‘Not Everybody Makes It’
How important is it to be acquainted with the oeuvre of an artist before embarking on the listening required to review their work? Should the reviewer be au fait with the back catalogue of the creator, their side projects, solo work, former bands before committing an opinion, or even a guided tour of the new dispatch to words? Do I need to have at least an overview of a musician’s previous output in order to contextualise their new creation? Or does having their artistic back catalogue as a point of reference colour the way that any and all listeners hear, experience and formulate views on everything the artist does ad infinitum?
In short, is it better to dive in cold or to gradually immerse oneself in the heated pool of historical creation?
No idea. But it is a question with some relevance when one comes to the work of Mark Solotroff, who, for those who are unaware, is a veteran of the doom band Anatomy Of Habit as well as the electronic band Bloodyminded. He founded the early post-industrial band Intrinsic Action and has played a part in, or otherwise collaborated with, a list of acts as long as your arm, including The Atlas Moth, Brutal Truth, Consumer Electronics, Indian, Locrian, Plague Bringer, Sigillum S, and The Sodality. There are as many polarities as there are points of useful comparison in this list but there is a vein coursing with a consistent lifeblood that underlies Solotroff’s work, and that sanguinatory fluid is a love for the analogue synth.
I’m no synth expert – analogue or otherwise – but this album is awash with swathes of synth drones, tones, and noise, huge washes of brittle texture bordering on crisp, stretched percussion in their timbre and pitch. Against this sonic setting the melodies, such as they are, comprise simple, short softer phrases that contrast with the thin, continuous drone that form the backbone of each piece.
The drone shimmers throughout this collection sounding for all the world like a glass armonica, swelling and rising, swirling around the head of the listener, giving the feeling of being lost in the baleful fog of a nineteen seventies children’s television programme in which psychedelic horror, far too adult for its audience, threatens the protagonist (and vicariously the viewer) at every twist. This music is metallic enough to leave a coppery taste in the listener’s mouth but it certainly ain’t metal. This is a pure, fragile, crystalline drone, one that conjures images of its creation on Tibetan singing bowls and the aforementioned glass armonica, though one assumes that these sounds were teased by Solotoff out of his beloved analogue synths.
layers of stillness, movement, fragility, ambivalence, menace, and unease wrapped in the strata of glassy, metallic drone…
Re-listening to Not Everybody Makes It I keep coming back to the idea that there’s an all encompassing stillness in this music, and yet at its heart is an inexorable motion, a movement that is perpetual but keeps us trapped within a Escher-like circuit, ever gliding on, never to reach the end, yet always at the end. The accompanying promotional material describes this work as unexpectedly tranquil and that maybe true if the listener is expecting something akin to Solotroff’s previous work. I can’t help feeling that within the brittle drone is a dark ambivalence bordering on menace – one could, with little difficulty, imagine certain scenes from a Ben Wheatly or an Ari Aster film being played out to any of the pieces herein.
There is a device within this album, in that each piece is exactly ten minutes long. There are two views one could take of this: Firstly, that shorter pieces have been pointlessly stretched and longer pieces cruelly curtailed in order to satisfy the conceit. Secondly, that the artist has disciplined his ambition to provide himself with a constrictive frame within which he must work. I like the latter way of looking at it, by placing limits on his work Solotroff has stretched himself, rather than the ideas, has forced himself to answer a self-imposed question. This, I would imagine, requires some rigour from a creative, a willingness to corral and cull any organic growth that wants to spread beyond the prescribed space.
This collection was in part Solotroff’s response to the emergence of the pandemic last year, a set of circumstances that intensified the significance of the themes with which his work is usually concerned – how people navigate and interact with each other, particularly in an age of alienation caused by severe digital fragmentation, how cities develop and how the human body navigates urban environments. Taking this into account the layers of stillness, movement, fragility, ambivalence, menace, and unease wrapped in the strata of glassy, metallic drone make sense. This is a very beautiful yet disquieting collection that Solotroff has created, perfect for our times.
Label: Independent
Band Links: Official | Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram
Scribed by: George Green
Monday, July 26, 2021
Focus on The Fortieth Day
 NEWS Our previously announced album, "Under The Influence Of Delirium," will be released by Mexico City-based label, Ruido Horrible, but it has understandably been delayed due to the pandemic. Ruido Horrible will release it on cassette, after which, we'll release it on CD and across digital platforms. As a follow-up to our 2020 album, "Narratives Of Cultural Alienation," we also have a new album that we're making good progress on, but we're waiting to determine a release date until we have a better sense of when "Under The Influence Of Delirium" will be released. LIVE We're happy to announce that we have a live show in collaboration with Noise Crush coming up on Wednesday August 4, in support of multidisciplinary artist Bruce McClure. It's presented by Chicago Underground Film Festival and it'll be held at Elastic Arts. Full details are available on the Facebook event page: https://fb.me/e/1U4l4uZYf  THREADLESS You can now find T-shirt, hoody, and tote-bag designs in our Threadless collection and we'll be adding more designs in the future: https://bloodyminded.threadless.com/collections/the-fortieth-day LISTEN All of our albums are available on CD, or to stream/download, via Bandcamp: https://thefortiethday.bandcamp.com/ You can also stream select releases via: Spotify / iTunes/Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon / Tidal / Deezer Additional ordering options for CDs: BloodShop! / eBay / Discogs DISCOGRAPHY Narratives Of Cultural Alienation (Cassette/CD/Digital, 2020, no label) A Mournful Silence (CD/Digital, 2019, no label) There They Made Their Peace (Cassette/Digital, 2018; CD, 2019, no label) Tenochtitlan: 1520 AD (CD/Digital, 2012, BloodLust!) The Fortieth Day + Sshe Retina Stimulants + Terence Hannum "Advent" (Cassette, 2012, Land of Decay; CD/Digital, 2013, BloodLust!) Constantinople: 746 AD - Part 2 (CD/Digital, 2011, BloodLust!) Constantinople: 746 AD - Part 1 (CD/Digital, 2011, BloodLust!) The Fortieth Day + Sshe Retina Stimulants (Cassette, 2007, BloodLust!; CD/Digital, 2009, BloodLust!) Syria: 638 AD - The Complete Recordings (CD/Digital, 2009, BloodLust!) Syria: 638 AD (LP, 2008, Diophantine Discs) Pelusium: 540 AD (Cassette, 2007, Cipher Productions; CD/Digital, 2010, BloodLust!) 03/30/07 (Cassette, 2007, BloodLust!; CD/Digital, 2020, no label) 02/20/07 (Cassette, 2007, BloodLust!; CD/Digital, 2020, no label) V (Cassette, 2007, BloodLust!; CD/Digital, 2008, BloodLust!) IV (Cassette, 2007, BloodLust!; CD/Digital, 2008, BloodLust!) III (Cassette, 2006, BloodLust!; CD/Digital, 2008, BloodLust!) II (Cassette, 2006, BloodLust!; CD/Digital, 2008, BloodLust!) I (Cassette, 2006, BloodLust!; CD/Digital, 2008, BloodLust!)  |
Sunday, July 25, 2021
Brainwashed on Not Everybody Makes It
BRAINWASHED
Mark Solotroff, "Not Everybody Makes It"
July 25, 2021, by Creaig Dunton
Mark Solotroff could never be accused of taking it easy when it comes to music, both in terms of style and productivity. Since the beginning of 2020 he has been responsible for three side project releases (Nightmares, The Fortieth Day, and Ensemble Sacrés Garçons), two archival releases from his early Intrinsic Action band, and just a matter of weeks ago a BLOODYMINDED live compilation. Add that to three volumes of compiled solo material and an album last year, and there’s a massive stack of material that Not Everybody Makes It now sits atop. Even with all of that material, this new album stands out as distinct, and somewhat of an unexpected turn for Solotroff's work, but is still clearly his.
What makes this disc stand out is the more significant restraint and lighter touch he employs on all six of these (exactly) ten minute pieces. I would be significantly concerned if he released anything that is not constructed around lo-fi analog synth noises, and that is certainly the foundation of everything here, but the mixes are less dense and the volumes are lower, giving everything a bleaker, more isolated sensibility.
Themes of isolation have been prevalent in Solotroff's recent work, with a series of eight tapes in the past few years (compiled earlier this year onto three 2CD volumes as the Strategic Planning series), but while those captured a sense of urban loneliness and anomie, Not Everybody Makes It is more personal and introspective. Besides the intentional imagery conveyed by the title, the hushed volumes and pseudo-melodies (not something often associated with his work) lock on to this sense of loneliness and despair.
Even with this more ambient (or isolationist, to borrow the fitting term for the 1990s ambient offshoot genre that never was) turn, certain staples from Solotroff's repertoire could never be abandoned: his love of heavy sub bass frequencies appears throughout, especially on "Charged Matter (The Problem from the Inside)" and "Suffering Sun (Barren Winter)." For both of these that low end is still prominent, but on the former it is an undulating passage beneath lightly drifting electronics and synths like bowed strings mixing with amplified hums. On the latter, it gives a slow, trudging propulsion beneath melodic sweeps and subtle white noise sheets.
The rumble also underscores most of "The Chaos of Objects (Tell Her to Follow Me)," paired with hissy metallic static. Here, even though the instrumentation never really deviates from those basic elements, Solotroff still effortlessly blends the basic parts into a piece with distinct movement and flow. This contrasts with the idling engine ambience of "Spatial Unrest (Irresistible Belief)," which is perfectly still and frozen. He saves the most peaceful piece for the end: "Return to Pleasure (Body Into Voice)" is a suite of droning tones that slowly drift away, making for the most peaceful work I have ever heard him have a hand in.
The shift of studying isolation from the spatial to the personal is pretty clear from this series of vignettes that complement Solotroff’s Strategic Planning works. Emphasizing the incidental melodies and sounds that are usually obscured by distortion and noise in his discography, there is thematic linkage, but the end products are distinct. For that reason there is a sense of vulnerability to Not Everybody Makes It that is rarely so obvious in his many projects. When placed alongside his other recent releases, it shows just how, in the hands of an expert, decades old electronic equipment can conjure such varying experiences and emotions. It may be a slight deviation from his normal approach, but the results are just as captivating.
Chicago Reader on Not Everybody Makes It
CHICAGO READER
Mark Solotroff, Not Everybody Makes It
July 22, 2021, by Monica Kendrick
Chicago sound wizard Mark Solotroff has been wielding his powerful electronic grimoire since the mid-80s as the leader of Intrinsic Action, Bloodyminded, and Anatomy of Habit. He’s also collaborated with a who’s who of industrial and metal artists, including the Atlas Moth, Indian, Locrian, Plague Bringer, Wrekmeister Harmonies, Brutal Truth, and the Body. Then there are his side projects: in the past couple years, he’s remastered the extensive body of lo-fi synth music he released under the name Super Eight Loop, put out an album with dark-synth trio Nightmares, and revived his Milan-Chicago postindustrial collective Ensemble Sacrés Garçons, who put out their first album in 25 years. Solotroff brings the sum of his experience to bear on the albums he puts out under his own name, which reflect an artistic discipline that makes each record a distinct work with its own specific intentions. His new release, Not Everybody Makes It, is somber and deliberately restrained, meant to be played at a volume that allows the ambient sounds of the listener’s home to slip through (unlike some of his other work, which is definitely meant to be heard overwhelmingly loud). With its six songs, which run about ten minutes each, Solotroff shapes sound into bite-size meditations that thread the needle between representing anxiety and soothing it. Much of his work is confrontational and violent, but he’s also a master of the elegiac (such as in Anatomy of Habit), and that’s on full display throughout Not Everybody Makes It. Like much of the music I’ve heard from the past year and a half, its emotional perimeter has been shaped in part by solitude, grief, and worry. The opening track, “Charged Matter (The Problem From the Inside),” lays down the thesis and the challenge: to ground oneself and accept a new reality, to sit with the present moment and feel the sorrow for what has been lost. Solotroff often focuses on the relationship between the body and consciousness, and the windlike sweep and nagging drone of “Attention to Flesh (Compel Yourself)” make it sound like music for a spiritual workout with a ghostly personal trainer who isn’t going to cut you any slack. Solotroff recorded and mixed the album himself in April and May 2021, and Collin Jordan mastered it at the Boiler Room in May, as vaccines were being distributed en masse and Chicago began to slowly open up. A sense of hope permeates some of the tracks, such as “Return to Pleasure (Body Into Voice),” which invokes a cautious sense of relief that can only come after a difficult ordeal. Not Everybody Makes It is a beautiful, subtle record that will reward repeated listenings.
Tuesday, July 20, 2021
Mark Solotroff - Video Premiere
Charged Matter (The Problem From The Inside)
Reposting from Earsplit PR
Bloodyminded and Anatomy Of Habit founder, electronic music veteran, artist, multi-instrumentalist, and all around noise mastermind MARK SOLOTROFF today unveils a video for “Charged Matter (The Problem From The Inside).” Now playing at Captured Howls, the track appears on SOLOTROFF’s new solo album, Not Everybody Makes It, set for release July 30th.
Recorded and mixed by SOLOTROFF during April and May of 2021 and mastered by Collin Jordan at The Boiler Room in May in 2021, Not Everybody Makes It is SOLOTROFF’s most restrained and controlled synth recording to date. While he anticipated creating a hybrid of more primitive and aggressive sounds balanced by more subtle ambient textures, by the time he finished mixing the six new songs — each one exactly ten-minutes in length — he realized that he had made significant strides in evolving his recent style. Not Everybody Makes It functions as a sonic elegy to the countless losses that so many of us have suffered over the last year and in the recent past, and its shimmering and crumbling frequencies and textures enter into a tense balancing act with elusive melodies that slowly drown in and then emerge from the shifting and eroding dronescapes.
Notes SOLOTROFF of “Charged Matter (The Problem From The Inside),” “This is the first video that I’ve ever made and I think it accurately matches the immensely lonely mood of the song. Building upon the mapping exercises and iconography that I’ve included in my work over the last few years, the path followed in this video depicts prominent streets and bridges near my building, which I’ve spent a great deal of time on, particularly during the past year, or so. Cars and people move at unnaturally slow speeds, mirroring the pace of the song and advancing the underlying sense of isolation introduced by the music.”
Writes Captured Howls in part, “The song feels like a meditation on solitude amid noise — or at least the sense of such a thing, since dissociative unease proves readily apparent in the sound. The ominous track comes with a video that Solotroff put together, and the imagery that he’s provided supports this idea. The video, in which images have been altered and presented in a grayscale color palette but remain recognizable, follows a journey through city streets, and there’s an impression of feeling alone, or perhaps weighed down, even as signs of activity continue on largely unabated — and largely uncaring for the people living within their wakes…”
Read more and view MARK SOLOTROFF’s “Charged Matter (The Problem From The Inside)” video at THIS LOCATION.
Stream previously released “Suffering Sun (Barren Winter)” at THIS LOCATION.
Not Everybody Makes It will be available on CD, in a four-panel digipak featuring SOLOTROFF’s photography, and on all major digital platforms. Find preorders via Bandcamp HERE or iTunes/Apple Music HERE.
MARK SOLOTROFF‘s artwork and music focuses on several related key themes, including how cities develop, both organically and through organized planning, how the human body navigates urban environments, and how people navigate and interact with each other, particularly in an age of alienation caused by severe digital fragmentation.
In the music world, SOLOTROFF is best known as the vocalist of both the doom band Anatomy Of Habit and the heavy electronic band Bloodyminded, and as the founder of the early post-industrial band Intrinsic Action. He also has a more than thirty-five-year history playing analog synthesizer. His synth work has been at the core of Bloodyminded and Intrinsic Action, and he recorded and released one-hundred hours of lo-fi analog synth music under the name Super Eight Loop, which he recently digitized and remastered. He is part of the dark-synth group Nightmares, which released a new album in early 2020, as well as the post-industrial trio, Ensemble Sacrés Garçons, which released their first new album in over twenty-five years, in early 2021.
SOLOTROFF has also collaborated with and contributed synth and/or vocals to numerous bands, ranging from a four-year role in Wrekmeister Harmonies, to live appearances and/or studio recordings with diverse electronic, experimental, and metal bands, including The Atlas Moth, Brutal Truth, Consumer Electronics, Indian, Locrian, Plague Bringer, Sigillum S, and The Sodality. In late 2019, SOLOTROFF‘s synth was included on new releases by Azar Swan (“The Hissing Crane” on Primal Architecture) and The Body (“Remixed” on Thrill Jockey), and in 2020, he created remixes, augmented with his synth, for Statiqbloom (“Asphyxia Remixed” on Synthicide) and Snow Burial (“Painting The Streets With Our Blood”).
For MARK SOLOTROFF coverage contact liz@earsplitcompound.com
http://marksolotroff.com
http://www.facebook.com/solotroff
http://www.instagram.com/marksolotroff
http://marksolotroff.bandcamp.com/
http://marksolotroff.com
http://www.facebook.com/solotroff
http://www.instagram.com/marksolotroff
http://marksolotroff.bandcamp.com/
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