photo credit: Allyson Pinon
If you live anywhere in this country’s northeastern regions you probably got walloped with a foot or two of snow last week and more since. With more of the white stuff and also frigid temps forecast all week it’s perfect weather for staying in–not that we weren’t doing that already, but hey added incentive–and watching live sets of electronic music performed by a wide array of live acts and DJs on the screen of your own choosing.
Or if you’re NYC-based electronic musicmaker and painter/multimedia artist Nuxx Vomica, who recently released her debut EP A Different Place, it’s perfect weather for traveling a few hours upstate and performing a live set in the middle of a frozen lake to an audience of confused yet grateful freshwater fish. And lucky for us, said performance was filmed and broadcast (and now archived) as part of last Thursday’s installment of Strict Tempo—a weekly livestream originating out of Seattle featuring a world-spanning Whitman’s Sampler of live DJs and live acts in the veins of EBM/industrial, acid/electro/techno, minimal wave/darkwave, Italo-disco/hi-NRG and other equally cool-sounding slashed and hyphenated genres…
…and after watching this performance one thing I’d like to know is where one finds an extension cord long enough to reach all the way out to the middle of a frozen lake. Then again sometimes it’s best for the stagecraft to remain mysterious and what mysterious it is as a latex body-suited figure crawls across the snowy landscape to open the set and there’s some neat-o Chroma key & chemtrails effects added to the visual mix and also what a perfect setting for Ms. Vomica’s raw thrumming beats and burbling coldwave oscillations and icy ethereal vocal interjections. Plus SHE’S PERFORMING IN THE MIDDLE OF A FREAKIN’ FROZEN LAKE and I can’t help but flashing back to that one scene in Omen II but thank goodness that didn’t happen, instead the setting just ramps up the otherworldly urgency of the music even more.
And as if this wasn’t enough for one show this installment of Strict Tempo had/has lots going for it, which granted is pretty typical but this one went extra hard with additional sets by Asymptote from Arizona who creates haunted experimental industrial soundscapes, Crimental from Colombia who specializes in driving dystopic electro EBM (his latest full length The Human Plague is indeed pretty sick) and Hands of Providence–a project “rooted in dark psyche of the human mind” especially those of various politicians and televangelists and other undesirables–all kicked off by a DJ set from our host Vox Sinistra.
As reigning queen of dark & danceable and occasionally not so danceable beats, Ms. Sinistra introduces each show with a charmingly low-key, unassuming and always informative description of the acts about to perform while backed by green-screened backdrops of infinitely scrolling bondage chains or dancing skeletons or nightclub footage or surreal film clips with occasional cameos by her tuxedoed cat—the production values on the show are consistently aces with each DJ/EDM artist bringing their own distinct look and vibe and setting.
And there’s more from where that came from so if you enjoyed these sounds and visions you’re in luck because there’s 43 previous episodes of Strict Tempo in existence as of this writing to be explored in part or in full on Vox’s Twitch channel and Youtube channel and Mixcloud and probably other portals I’m unaware of even existing. (Jason Lee)