CORVYX - At The Stake

Written by C Z A R I N A

New York City - based alternative pop artist and YouTube star CORVYX burns “At The Stake” in this haunting new video. A self-proclaimed “Space Witch,” over the last several years, Corvyx has been enchanting audiences with his own brand of cinematic dark pop - an alchemical fusion of ethereal production, haunting power vocals that have no limits, and a sublime otherworldly aesthetic and visual feast that keeps viewers suspended and hungry for more.

Just in time for the dark season, "At the Stake" captures the anxiety and hysteria of the classic witch hunt, but this time reimagined in reverse. The song celebrates dark outcasts and sets ablaze those who damn the different. True to his artist mission, Corvyx serves once again as a shining, dark, powerful messenger and voice for the misunderstood. The visuals feature top-notch artistry in costuming, prosthetics and atmospheric cinematography that disturbs the calm, yet calms the disturbed.

A self-made, diligent, independent success story and musical force, Corvyx rose to popularity by reinventing popular songs in his macabre aesthetic, amassing 10+ million YouTube views, and a digital audience of nearly 200k followers. Yet above all, the most striking aspect about Corvyx is that to those who know him well, this artist carries a sincere authenticity not just in his work, but in the tender and humble consciousness that he shares with his adoring fans and peers alike.

The perfect package and inspiring epitome of a modern artist today.

For more info on CORVYX, visit his YouTube

BUNNY X - Young & In Love

Written by Thorisson with excerpts from our latest video podcast

Exquisite. Spectacular. Breathtakingly addictive. These are just a few words that don’t do Young & in Love justice; it is no doubt one of my favourite albums of the year. I could sit here and write a full-blown essay on why this album is so damn good, but I won’t. Instead, this article will explore a bit of Bunny X’s history—their Italo disco roots and how they got into making synthwave music. What I will say, however, is that Young & in Love is a must-have for everyone. If you’re a vinyl collector, pick it up. If you like digital downloads, get it. And if you’re into streaming, put every single song on your personal playlists, because I guarantee that they are all worthy of a spot.

Despite being pre-dominantly synthwave artists today, your roots lie in Italo disco. Can you tell us a bit about that genre?

Italo disco came about in Europe in the late 70s as a jump-off from disco music. They had all these different synthesizers coming out at the time that a lot of artists and producers were getting into. Which synthesizer they were able to get their hands on depended on what country they were from, so you had all these different sounds coming out from each region of the world. But a lot of what made Italo disco happened through experimentation. We like to describe it as happy-sad music, with a combination of big major chords and sad lyrics. It’s very earnest. It’s very simple, yet very emotional and beautiful music. You had a lot of German, Italian and British artists at the beginning so it was predominantly based in Europe. Eventually it spread to other parts of the world, but it didn’t really reach the USA—apart from a few crossover artists like Baltimora and Laura Brannigan.

Walk us through a bit of your history - how did you first get into Italo disco?

We’ve known each other since 2005 and had always been having talks about doing something musical. Then one night at a party, we met Conrad Kaneshiro who became our producer. I (Abigail) got into Italo disco as a kid because my older brother had tons of records growing up but Mary got into it a littler later. Our first song was If You Say Yes; from there it kind of moved on and come 2015 we were invited to this huge Italo disco Festival in Mexico City, called Patrick Miller Fest. There, we got to perform with some Italo legends like Frank Ventura and Patrick Miller himself. It was an insane moment looking into the audience of around 12,000 people, with half of them singing the lyrics to our songs.

Is it on the agenda to perform at Patrick Miller fest again?

We’d love to! We really need to put pen to paper and get another “banger” out there and see if that connects with the audience in the same way as If You Say Yes.

When did you start shifting towards synthwave music?

We had been listening to synthwave artists like Parallels and FM Attack for years without even knowing that it was its own category. But as for making it ourselves, we just realised that we wanted to try something fresh. We didn’t want to pigeonhole ourselves. We love Italo disco and will definitely continue doing that, but synthwave just felt like such a fresh and active scene. It’s funny to say that though since it is a throwback to the 80s in itself! But the community is young, active and engaging so we wanted to get into that. It was around 2017 that we started to shift in that direction, and in 2018 we released Stay which was our very first synthwave based track.

We also asked Bunny X some quickfire questions.

Favourite musician?

Abigail: Madonna | Mary: Madonna

Guitar or piano?

Abigail: Piano | Mary: Guitar

Would you rather be a cat or a penguin?

Abigail: cat | Mary: cat

How old were you when you first fell in love?

Abigail: 15 | Mary: 17

So there you have it; they were truly young and in love! All these things—and so much more—were discussed in our latest Absynth Video Podcast episode. We recommend taking a look at it for some more crucial information, like exciting things to discover, in New York, the “new“  influencer, and whether Mary and Abigail would rather drink a gallon of hot dog water or eat 6 raw eggs.

ALPHA CHROME YAYO - Dead Air

Review by KIZUNAUT

Alpha Chrome Yayo is North Ireland’s brightest synth star who has been winning the hearts and minds of listeners far and near since 2018. His style is difficult to pin down, offering an absolutely unique mix of retrowave, jazz fusion, video game music, ambient and new age influences with a decent sprinkle of humor. More than a singular sound or style, his prolific output has been defined by his love of conceptual releases. He has made EPs and albums dedicated to lighter themes such as cooking and golf, but also themes such as ghosts and an (allegedly) true local legend of a “suburban sorceress”. 

Dead Air continues his tradition of thematic releases, this time with a darker theme that is a perfect fit for the spooky season. Described as “brain-boiling radio waves, cathode ray nightmares and low poly panic“ on Bandcamp, Dead Air seems to draw equal amounts of influence from ghoulish media of the past and the newer art of analog horror, a faux-documentary style of horror storytelling building myths of lost broadcasts and unearthed tapes telling of terrible things. 

Alpha Chrome Yayo has been historically talented at conjuring up very particular vibes for his releases, and Dead Air is not different. The occasionally cartoony, occasionally somber, sometimes hair raising, sometimes surreal vibe of the album is extremely unique. It feels at times like the UK concept of “video nasty” given life, a digitized homunculus of a cultural concept, retromancy of the best sort, music that looks into the past with a vision to articulate. Beyond finding fun, horror and strangeness in past media, there is perhaps also a bit of a subtheme of media addiction to it all. This sort of conceptual work in music is reminiscent of the vaporwave scene's best offerings. 

The style of production is about as diverse as the music found on the album, offering a mix of digital neo-retro tunes, a few more atmospheric numbers and some murkier and stranger sound explorations. A halloween snack buffet of digi-synths populate the album, from the potent FM basslines and shrill beeps and clicks to video game sounds, hypnagogic synth pads, washes of digi-noise and bright keys. It’s all a fair bit more energetic, even danceable than some of his earlier, more ambient offerings. 

Nevertheless, the production has a bit of a carefree, atmosphere-oriented vibe to it even at its hardest, though it’s not as lush or ambient as some of his earlier work. This isn’t for people looking for earth-shattering optimized kicks or eardrum bursting snares, but there is a kind of early 90s clarity to it all. The instruments feel very well placed in the sonic range most of the time and there is purity and precision to even the gnarliest of tones. Taken at its context, the production choices work well, but perhaps a production style that really embraced the analog horror aspect with a few sprinkles of tape hiss, VHS distortion and grave dust could have elevated the work even more.

Alpha Chrome Yayo has had a knack for finding vibrant, unusual visuals for his music. The artwork for Dead Air isn’t as colorful as some of his other albums, featuring a demonic entity emerging from TV static, presented as a physical album cover wrapped in plastic. While there is nothing wrong with the artwork per sé, I feel like it doesn’t quite encapsulate the deliriously colorful range of music in the album, feeling a bit more like something fit for more traditional darksynth. 

When it comes to the actual music on offer, the album has 18 tracks of ghosty and gobliny synth toe-tappers, creepy twisted city pop-infused weird-out pieces and unusual graverobbed adaptations of pre-existing songs with a couple of pieces sitting outside of these categories.  

The album opens with Intro//The Sigil, a quick atmospheric burst of terror, before moving into the title track Dead Air. The title track offers a very satisfying mix of sinister churning basslines, a strange but addictive beepy synthline and a variety of creepy atmospheric synth lines, topped off with distorted voice samples talking about strange broadcasts.  

Drowned in 120ft of Suffocating Static offers a strangely chill take on the digi-morbid subject matter, offering shimmering synth pads, swirly atmospherics and breathy vocoder lines over deep basslines and driving beats. 

The next track Cathode Ray Chewed sounds almost like a piece of music from some kind of horror-themed Sega action game with it’s bouncy FM basslines and rad but ghoulish leads. Alpha Chrome Yayo also demonstrates his lead guitar chops on this track. A big favorite from the album and I wish it was longer! 

Dissolver is a curious piece of hypnagogic horror pop, offering morbid vocoder lyrics over a rather relaxing instrumental of bright yet chill synths, passes of electric piano and a laid-back digital beat, an ode to rotting away in front of your TV.  

The next song is first of the covers on offer, a reverb-drenched piano rendition of Franz Liszt's Liebesträume No. 3, here subtitled the Gut Machine, perhaps a nod to analog horror’s tendency of using twisted versions of past music as an element.  

The next track, Bloodthirsty Little Imp picks up the pace and offers a mix of deep, groovy basslines, deranged arps, distorted spoken lyrics and straight up screaming over a nice house-influenced beat. One of my favorites from the album for it’s off kilter vibe and powerful energy. 

Black Noise offers a mix of deep basslines, sad bells, a slow beat and a shrill lead, painting a mournful, serious atmosphere. Radio Smack lightens up the mood a bit with it’s fun mix of pulsing basslines, chiptune leads, groovy beats and Alpha Chrome Yayo rapping(!) about the titular radio smack. Both of these rank among my favorites from the album, for polar opposite reasons. 

Tectonic March is a synth rendition of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Slavonic March, Op. 31, played on a variety of digital synths that make it sound straight out of the soundtrack of some archaic horror game.  

Next comes Funeral In My Brain which is a performance of I Felt A Funeral in my Brain by Emily Dickinson, offering a very ambient piece dominated by hypnotic, swirly pads and vocoded lyrics that allude to an almost comic kind of horror. 

P0rtcullis is almost more of a sound effect than a song, offering a rapid-fire chiptune transition into the next track. Coffin Full of Cables offers a fun, very videogame-esque mix of rapid arps, organs and melodies mournful and curious alike. It would not sound out of place in some kind of a halloween themed platformer. Another favorite from the album. 

Shards offers a mix of bright, percussive keyboards and strange digital noises that sit somewhere between liquid and crystal, the whole painting a curious yet somber mood. Rhapsody in Black is is a reimagining of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, offering a mix of tectonic piano lines, creepy whistling sounds and chiming keyboards that paint the soundtrack of a black and white horror movie. 

Bunker 47 is pure analog horror in it’s mix of sinister ambient sounds and computer generated dialogue between two characters, talking about power failures and the need to complete a ritual. The next track Last Transmission offers an uncanny juxtaposition of a kind of relaxed, jazzy instrumental with organs that occasionally slip into dissonance and a computerized voice spilling out gruesome lyrics. Notable for its inclusion of acoustic drums.

The Last Transmission is however not the last track of the album, as that honor belongs to The Black Broadcast. It offers a mix of driving rhythms, creepy arps, swirly pads, sharp keyboards and a thumping beat that goes into double-time during the latter half of the song. Breathy vocoded lyrics talk about flowing with electricity and seeing the future and the past. Sonically and thematically it feels like the album summed up, and it is a very fine way to end the album. 

Dead Air offers a fun and varied mix of music for the Halloween season that however also has substance beyond the first bite. Some may find the very eclectic nature of the album off-putting, but for me, it created an atmosphere quite like nothing else. Alpha Chrome Yayo has shown himself to be once again an artist capable of conjuring up interesting, fresh concepts. For those not familiar with his work and who have an appetite for lost horror game soundtracks, errant broadcasts and exhumed video tapes, the album is well worth checking out. 

For more Alpha Chrome Yayo, visit alphachromeyayo.bandcamp.com

MACHINA X - The Art Of Letting Go

Review by Jake Griffiths of Electrodrome FM

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. How we process our grief might be understood but it remains one of the most powerful and destructive emotional forces that human-beings encounter. MACHINA X’s EP release The Art of Letting Go goes deep into the feelings that drive us when we give up something we love.

In musical release terms at least, the Anglo-Burmese duo have had a comparatively quiet 2021, interrupted by events in Myanmar while they worked on an ‘all or nothing’ 2021 release. The Art of Letting Go is a 6-track EP, charting the emotional journey of loss.

The first thing you notice about this record is how far the Machina X sound has come since previous releases. Never ones to shy away from trying new things, the duo have always been genre-neutral, having expressed their music in forms from drum and bass to electro and even folk. Gone are the samples, multi-tempo experiments and different drum sounds. Here the sound may mutate across the tracks in speed and sometimes style, but it is fully consistent and has a real identity. The Machina X of late 2021 is a strong mix of crisp percussion, driving basslines and Annie’s beautiful, wrought vocals. 

Intro track Prelude sets the tone perfectly before second track Fragile immediately lets you know what this record is intended to sound like - rolling, driving basslines that explode into a widescreen chorus with strings and sweeps that move all across the mix. It’s a gorgeous track and echoes the feel of Silent Now which comes later in the record.

Machina X released the track Belong To The Night as a single before the EP release. Sitting right in the middle of the record, it’s a heart-wrenching ballad with a dreamy, emotional vocal reminiscent of Kate Bush. It’s rightly been featured multiple times by the BBC Introducing team and is a pivotal moment in the EP, capturing so many of the main themes in one place. 

This release brings Machina X a full step forward from being musical experimenters into having a sound of their own - pulling in elements of songwriting, electro and synthpop into something that emotionally resonates. The duo say it was a hard, draining record to make, both in terms of what was happening around them but also the subject matter. It was worth it.

For more Machina X, visit machina-x.bandcamp.com