DKA rallies an industrial music renaissance

<a href="http://dka-records.com/album/dka-tape-programme-vol-1">DKA Tape Programme Vol. 1 by DKA Records</a>

In a town where band practice spaces have become a scarce commodity, musicians will adapt accordingly. Acts such as Caesium Mine, Pamela_And her sons, Pyramid Club, Anticipation, and more have mastered the art of crafting bombastic music without bothering the neighbors, via samplers, synthesizers, drum machines, and software. Along the way, an industrial music renaissance has taken shape. DKA Tape Programme Vol. 1, the latest release from Atlanta’s indie noise wranglers DKA Records places these Peachtree industrial dirge and drone artists into a larger national context of cybernetic post-punk music.

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Since the late 1970s, industrial music has served as both a hidden persuader as well as a scathing critic of modern culture. The music's subversive ethos and mechanical plod were a reactionary art form in an era when manipulating the media meant controlling mass thought. Naturally, a new and thriving strain of artists is pushing the music to inventive places amid the tumultuous 20-teens. DKA Tape Programme Vol. 1 rounds up 18 acts from Atlanta and elsewhere around the country giving an insider's look at a willfully outsider music scene. From Nick Klein’s machine funk rattle in opening number, “NRT3,” to the disembodied voice of Pamela_And Her Sons’ “I’ve,” a dark magnetism builds around a perfectly calibrated flow of abrasive rhythmic minimalism.

Bay Area artist Russell E.L. Butler's "Paranoid Drug" draws out an atmosphere of long, sustained techno steeped in dark rhythms, textures, and uneasy minimalism.

Each one of these songs taps into refreshingly new enclaves of glowering ambiance while working within a rigidly defined sound palette. Alex Barnett’s “Latitudes” (ft. Haley Fohr) is reminiscent of the golden age when Skinny Puppy’s Remission placed old school synths, haunted analogue sounds, and a distorted vocal growl on the dance floor. Drippy Inputs’ “Shattered Deadbolt” moves like an off-balanced washing machine in locked groove that resonates with the weight of the world while slowly into a decaying spectacle of chaos. When juxtaposed with the razor-sharp lines of Mannequin Lovers’ “Cramp My Style,” the tension becomes palpable.

TWINS’ twisted whispering and hissing dronescapes settle in at the end, bring the tape’s flow to a close. But the edge and the aura of unsettled energy lingers long after the music has gone silent.

Despite the blackened sounds and nihilistic imagery, Tape Programme Vol. 1 is a celebration of the music and the community itself. This is not the cold and glowing fonts and format of a Soundcloud page, but a cassette tape. It’s an honest-to-goodness physical artifact — a format considered antiquated by the masses, but revered, by the community these songs serve. Tape Programme Vol. 1 is an ode to both a focused ear and schismatic intellect — dance music to fight the new dystopia. ★★★★☆