Nero’s Day At Disneyland – Grand Reopening
Tonight’s batch of submissions leans into my regrowing enamourment with breakcore and otherwise frenetic, brainy production styles. It’s hard for me to quite trace my renewed interest in these sorts of sounds. When I was a teenager around the turn of the century, I got pretty heavy into this sort of thing, but only found myself returning to it recently. This may be a simple question of exposure — for years, when Palms Out was at its peak and I was producing and gigging a lot, I was focused more squarely on hiphop-adjacent club music — now, I find myself more open to discover what happens to cross my path. It seems like I hear more and more breakcore revivalists lately, and a lot of them are genuinely good.
Nero’s Day at Disneyland is the side project of Los Angeles composer Lauren Bousfield. To call Bousfield prolific feels a touch diminishing. Almost ten releases as Nero’s Day At Disneyland in the early aughts, a similar number under her own name in the time since, many more as part of collaborative acts like In-House Pharmacy, DOOREATER, Strip Mall Seizures, among several others, all in addition to her work as a composer for film, television, and games. Her latest EP as Nero’s Day At Disneyland, Grand Reopening, is Bousfield’s first release under that name in 17 years. Maybe her experience with this end of the musical spectrum is similar to my own, and this return to an old outlet is indicative of a collective cyclical experience. On one hand, Bousfield’s music under her own name always retained tinges of breakcore; on the other, she often seemed to eschew many of its dnb-adjacent tropes, generally favoring sprawling midi piano hypomania, adventures into melancholy digital hardcore (is that a thing?), and kinetic drumless sample-based patchwork cacoethes. This new record — and especially these two songs — is a return to form, of sorts, but with an evidently broader palette from which to draw. That may sound cliché, but you can so clearly hear Lauren Bousfield herself in this record, but now wrapped inside the unencumbered utter embrace of crazed blown-out breakbeats and satisfying breakcore conventions turned up to 11. Bousfield is a true master, and this record is her in the rarest of forms. Grab the EP on bandcamp, or find it for streaming wherever.
Nero’s Day At Disneyland – “Ghost Debt”
Nero’s Day At Disneyland – “ØBabylon”
demodisc – Monolith Emerging
In a similar vein comes this excellent song from Wilmington-based demodisc, an artist I have never run across before, and about whom there is essentially no information online. It appears they only started working under this name last year, releasing a handful of singles prior to an album, A Line in the Sand, a Missing Piece, which came out last month. The song that I found most compelling from the album is also its most aggressive. Where most of the album lives somewhere on the ambient spectrum, this song is all beautifully distorted warm-drum brutality, to great effect. There aren’t any other songs on the album that go as far into the fire, as it were, but there are still other moments of real beauty, and at times I heard traces of artists who walk this same continuum, like Ital Tek or Lorn. Grab the album on bandcamp or find it streaming (and if you can’t afford to support, look closely at demodisc’s minimal online presence; you’ll find bandcamp codes).
demodisc – “Monolith Emerging”
demodisc – “Scenes from a Distant Vision”
ERRx – exo.exe
Last up tonight is a familiar name on the blog, the anonymous artist, ERRx, who I’ve covered consistently over the course of a string of singles and EPs over the past few years. Writing about ERRx and their contemporaries in the gaming-associated world of hyper-melodic, liquidy breakcore revivalism (that I’ve insistently termed ‘online jungle’) is probably one of the main reasons I’ve found my way back to this end of the shelf again. If for no other reason, I’ve certainly been unwittingly training my algo with numerous late-night deep dives into these pockets of the internet. ERRx has a lovely sort of naive quality to their music. It’s never overly serious; it inhabits its space with total comfort, never trying to impress you with excessively broad-minded ideas or overcomplexity. This is music to enjoy with a brightly colored soft drink and LED strip lighting. Both of these lovely new songs are from the artist’s recent debut long-player, Chaotic Digital, which is out now on bandcamp or for streaming.
ERRx – “prison realm”
ERRx – “exo.exe”