We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you a special message from HDMIRROR. CAUTION: STROBE WARNING.
The audiovisual practice of HDMIRROR is a hard thing to describe, it’s really something you have to experience. If asked, the artist opts for “dysfunctional dance music”, “transformation through overload”, “euphoria simulator”, “neural fireworks” and, perhaps most cryptically, “sabotage and tradition.” Citing key influences as Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard and Dutch EDM giant Tiësto, HDMIRROR is an ever-evolving site of 21st century iconoclasm, a hard dance glitch in the simulation causing the sounds and images of dance music’s past, present and future to buckle and twist as they are catapulted at frightening speed into the stratosphere.
Yet, in spite of the artist’s “high octane music theory”, HDMIRROR’s off-kilter Music for Accelerationists never regresses into techno-nihilism. Uncontaminated by the digital world, the artist’s disruptive audiovisual broadcasts are precision engineered to wreak havoc IRL, imbued with a purity of spirit and a pranksterish playfulness that seeks to commune with the ghosts of rave past while at the same time transcending the machinic grind of the modern music industry. In many ways, “THIS MUSIC” can be understood as a potent distillation of this drive, a hyperreal reflection of what it’s like to rave in a world where the physical and the virtual are constantly at each other’s throats.
Serving as a sort of spiritual successor to The Future Sound of London’s ’90s classic ISDN, which was edited together from a number of live broadcasts the band had transmitted to radio stations across the world using the Integrated Services Digital Network, “THIS MUSIC” plays out like unreleased episode of Amp, MTV’s ’90s foray into the world of electronic music. “The format is presented like a signal disruption broadcasting abstracted forms that change every second in response to the music, a visual representation of associative synaesthesia,” explains HDMIRROR. “New and ancient visual shapes collide with new and old sounds in a new and old format.”
The artist injects a cascading procession of hard-edge jungle variations with razor-sharp synthetic textures and seething passages of dark euphoria, all while moving through the supercharged trance and mutant hardcore sounds that have become the artist’s signature sounds. This provides the perfect score for an onslaught of stroboscopic imagery, as HDMIRROR pulls us head first through what it might be like if you threw a ’90s rave at the site of an archeological dig. Lasers, blown-out speakers and religious iconography ricochet off snarling breakbeats and stomach-churning bass. Welcome to the world of HDMIRROR.
You can visit the HDMIRROR Bandcamp and follow them on Instagram.
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