Words by Jason Lee. Cover image by Sydney Tate.
The title of Venus Twins’ new EP is rendered entirely in slashes as in /\/\/\/\/ which they say is pronounced as “Stitching” but we prefer “eeeaaarrrrrgggghhhhh!!!!” which is an entirely reasonable response to the music contained therein with its full frontal onslaught of hardcore punk, glitchy electronica, and experimental noise terror mixed with pianissimo floaty dissociative ambient bits as heard in the opening moments of the EP which depending on your disposition are just as white-knuckle tension filled as the noisy bits if not more so…
….cuz you’re left just waiting for the bottom to fall out again and to top it all off /\/\/\/\/ sounds as if was burned onto a CD-R whose surface has been scraped with sandpaper and gravel then inserted into a decades-old CD Walkman and played as you ride on the back of a speeding motorcycle with the disc understandably glitching and skipping as first heard towards the end of the fittingly-titled opening track “Prelude/\/\/\/\/“…
…so yeah it’s berserker stuff but no less fascinating for it (just the opposite!) and what’s even more berserk is how Venus Twins manage to reproduce these sounds at their equally bonkers live shows using nothing more than bass, drums, and vocals plus the occasional shaken bag full of cymbal shards meaning it’s probably no mistake that /\/\/\/\/ looks like a sawtooth wave that’s seemingly designed to saw your head off via the duo’s slashing sonic attack but not before gently caressing your neck and whispering some ASMR sweet nothings into your ear like an earlobe-licking Twitch streamer who then somehow bursts thru your computer screen and chomps on your actual ear…
…which given the sonic extremes at play makes /\/\/\/\/ feel very much like Music For Our Times not that Venus Twins would ever be so precious or pretentious about it but hey we’re willing to go there especially as one gets the overriding sense after last Tuesday in particular (and don’t even get us started on AI’s impending rise of the machines) that collectively as a species we’re situated on the precipice of falling down into a full-on Reality Distortion Field even more powerful than the one we’re currently living under and we’ll leave it at that but suffice to say Venus Twins’s music is perfect for soundtracking the latent chaos-to-come in our book…
…which to be fair after giving the EP a few spins (good headphones highly recommended) one may come to the realization as we have that /\/\/\/\/ is actually quite lovely and some may even say exquisite in its own off-kilter, semi-demented way (think of Andy Warhol’s car crash and electric chair silk-screens as a point of comparison perhaps) esp. in how they seem to treat “music” and “noise” and everything in between as nothing more than a palette of musical pigments—visceral, tactile, and tangible—to be splashed, dripped, and smeared across a blank sonic canvas…
…with results that are less like Monet’s water lilies or Mondrian’s abstract cityscapes and more like Jackson Pollock’s splatter-punk action paintings or better yet Janet Sobel’s largely overlooked body of work which first inspired JP in the first place drawing on pure form and texture “in an attempt to achieve a visual convergence of subconscious feelings and physical actions” in depicting interior psychological states ranging from abject horror to quivering ecstasy as opposed to direct representation of objects which really boooooring…
…and along these lines it doesn’t hurt that Venus Twins are nearly as compelling visually as musically composed entirety of two honest-to-goodness twins who are as pale and gaunt as Nosferatu but with hair dyed the color of a cherry-banana flavored Life Savers and if we hadn’t already been told that the pair came to NYC from Denton, Texas we’d be willing to wager that Jake and Matt Derting in reality grew up in a bog somewhere like two monozygotic Kelpie-like dark horse shape-shifting water spirits risen from the bottom of a deep dark Scottish loch cuz let’s face it they just have that look and aura about them both equine and aquatic which maybe explains the fluidity of their music and its galloping forward momentum…
…so anyway we’re not fully convinced of their human provenance esp. seeing as we ourselves also hail from North Texas and granted Denton’s pretty weird but not that weird and if you watch the video above for “I Just Can’t Get Enough!” Jake & Matt come off more like mythological creatures who’ve only recently taken on humanoid form way more than they do run-of-the-mill University of North Texas music school weirdos…
…as the twins bop around Brooklyn looking like they’re still getting accustomed to living on land what with their abnormally wide strides and wider smiles and only three legs between them and then showing off their sewing machine like it’s the Hope Diamond so yeah they’re definitely kelpies with the whole “twins thing” serving as additional cover cuz fair or not people tend to assume twins are on a different wavelength than the rest of us…
…with our theory further supported by the Venus Twins being named for, well, Venus a.k.a. Aphrodite as in the Greco-Roman goddess formed out of sea foam after a clash between the titan Kronus and Kronus’s father Uranus led to the former lopping off the latter’s meat and two veg with a stone sickle (not cool!) provided to the young titan by dear ol’ vengeful mom Gaia (really not cool) then throwing his dad’s junk into the sea (really really not cool!) thus causing the sea to bubble up like a bitches’ brew and out pops the goddess of love so yeah that ol’ story again…
…and returning to “I Just Can’t Get Enough!” we figure it must’ve been written to sound as little like Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough” as possible at which it greatly succeeds tho’ granted the latter is one of D-Mode’s boppiest, poppiest songs from back in the Vince Clarke days whereas the Venus Twins song is more like what Dave Gahan must’ve heard playing in his head as he OD’ed and briefly expired from injecting a speedball in a dirty loo at which time he apparently flatlined for a full couple minutes before being revived…
…which ok granted “I Just Can’t Get Enough!” is probably the EP’s “poppiest” number, very relatively speaking, seeing as it’s got something akin to verses and choruses and a downright catchy one of the latter at that (“WHEN WILL HEAVENS CRUMBLE! I CUT TO SEE THEM OPEN! HELP ME GOD! HELD ME GOD! HELP ME GOD!”) but still it’s abrasive enough to bring someone back from the dead we think so you’d maybe be wise to carry around the song on your CD Walkman or iPod if you’re a big shot in lieu of Narcan nasal spray…
…and if there’s one thing the Venus Twins excel at it’s dynamics as demonstrated on the EP’s next number “God Help Me Bury This F*cking Light” which at about the 1:06 mark has one of the most extreme dynamic shifts ever committed to record according to the Guinness Book of World Records and they oughta know where one second it’s like your skull is being run over by a steamroller but which is a split-second shifts to a barely audible, ambient hum like Brian Eno’s Music For Ocean Floors but where the sea anemone on the ocean floor get sucked into the engine of a passing nuclear submarine before the song ends or that’s what it sounds like to us anyway…
…which gets at one crucial aspect of Venus Twins’s music we haven’t touched upon yet and that’s its sense of humor not that /\/\/\/\/i is gonna have you in stitches exactly but take the dynamic shift above which made us laugh out loud the first time we listened carefully to it cuz it’s just so absurd and funny sounding like expressionist cartoon music or like when you ride a rollercoaster that scares the bejesus out of you but where you’re alternating between screaming and giggling for the whole ride cuz it’s all just so ridiculous…
…and even tho’ we’re admittedly been all horror and car crashes and castration and electric chairs up to this point it’s worth pointing out how Matt and Jake are clearly a couple of sweethearts having a grand ol’ time doing what they’re doing which isn’t to say they’re not demented as well but either way there’s something truly joyous in their unfettered approach to creativity and their guileless go-to-it spirit while feeling free to push at the boundaries of what many people may consider to be “music” at all which let’s face it takes on added import as we enter into an era likely to be a good deal less free if certain people have their way so you heard it here first Jake & Matt for Jointly Shared Presidency in 2028…
…with the next track “Stitching” basically being as Venus Twins’ funk song and how exciting is that with the EP drawing to a close with “It Can’t End Like This” (naturally!) which during its second half sounds something like Indonesian kecak performed by a group of irate Oompa Loompas singing and playing on amplified Peking Opera percussion instruments but I suppose that much is obvious…
…which (spoiler alert!) again cuts off abruptly just as it’s cresting it’s brutal tsunami of noise then followed by 30-plus seconds of silence which leaves one wondering if there’s gonna be a stinger at the end which we ain’t telling but instead recommend that you invest 13 minutes and listen to /\/\/\/\/ top-to-bottom in one sitting cuz it’s one crazy quilt worth unraveling…
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OFFICIAL BAND BIO:
Twin telepathy is real. “Being twins is definitely an unusual life experience; it seems the only way Venus Twins works is that the only two people in the band have this specific connection to one another.”
Venus Twins was founded in Denton, TX in the summer of 2018 by Jake (drums) and Matt Derting (bass and vocals). They began writing/recording their first release, Kickass, immediately after inception, followed by a relocation to Brooklyn. Venus Twins’ first LP, Eat Your Dogs, accompanied this relocation. The next release was RAXIS, paired with nearly non-stop touring for two years averaging a show every 3.4 days, playing with bands such as Whores., Heavenly Blue, and Pons.
Of upcoming release Stitches (visualized as /\/\/\/\/), vocalist/bassist Matt explains: “I love sewing and making clothes. Throughout the recording of this EP I was practicing a lot, and it started to feel like a perfect metaphor lyrically.” The band is influenced by bands such as Hella, Gilla Band, Machine Girl, JOHNNASCUS, PageNinetyNine, Melt Banana, The Locust, The Mars Volta, and Anthony Green, as well as non-musical artists like Kurt Vonnegut, Andy Kaufman, Robert Eggers, the feeling of constantly being stressed out, and living in NYC.
Stitching was recorded, produced and mixed by Hayden Ticehurst at Studio G in Brooklyn, as well as his personal studio. Mastered by Dan Millice (Hella, A$ap Rocky).