Chicago-based producer Beau Wanzer makes dark, gritty electronic music inspired by early industrial, house/electro, and minimal synth. Often consisting of zombified vocals croaking over hypnotic machine rhythms, his music is eerie, grotesque, and a bit sleazy, but it always contains a crucial element of twisted, macabre humor. As a DJ his sets are an eclectic mix of these things but with an off-kilter approach...throwing in old punk, noise, and everything in-between.

Obsidian rock is igneous, frequently dark, yet opaque. Hard edged and brittle, it’s often been used both for weaponry and alchemical pursuits. Therefore when Lorena Quintanilla – the Mexican-based artist also known as J. Zunz – was searching for psychic inspiration for her next musical venture, she need have looked no further. “Once I chose the title, everything I read, saw, listened to, and thought about began to interconnect” she relates. “Obsidian became like a magnetic field.”
Paradoxically, this album – Quintanilla’s third under the J. Zunz name on Rocket – manages to be both more aggressive and more gentle than anything she’s previously created either on her own or in her work in Lorelle Meets The Obsolete. A study in balance, its emotional charge remains strong and intact whether on the eerie, almost Radiophonic ambience of ‘Imago’, the dancefloor-adjacent, Chris & Cosey-esque ‘Osiris’ or the abrasive, industrial-strength confrontation of ‘Silvia’. On ‘Final’ meanwhile, Lorena is joined by her only main collaborator this time around, Freddie Murphy (Father Murphy) whose trumpet and synth abstractions offer further vivid colour to ‘Obsidiana’s spectrum.

As a member of Ghent’s experimental music scene, over the past two decades Annelies Monseré has slowly refined a singular approach to musicality, moving from the sparse, instrumental piano works that defined her early career, toward increasingly complex arrangements of instrumentation that offer a central place to her own voice, issued by noteworthy imprints such as BlueSanct, Morc Tapes, Stroom, three:four, and Horn of Plenty. Like her work within the widely celebrated ensemble, Luster, as well as her duo with Goldscammer, Distels (her duo with Steve Marreyt) and Hydromedusae (her duo with Jessica Bailiff), Monseré’s solo efforts establish a strikingly beautiful and remarkably unique territory that elegantly balances between rigorous experimentalism, minimalism, drone, and folk.