Bloodyminded and Anatomy Of Habit founder, electronic music veteran, artist, multi-instrumentalist, and all around noise mastermind MARK SOLOTROFF is pleased to premiere his latest video, “Return To Pleasure (Body Into Voice),” today via Cvlt Nation. The track comes off SOLOTROFF’s Not Everybody Makes It full-length, released independently last month.
Recorded and mixed by SOLOTROFF during April and May of 2021 and mastered by Collin Jordan at The Boiler Room in May in 2021, Not Everybody Makes It is SOLOTROFF’s most restrained and controlled synth recording to date. While he anticipated creating a hybrid of more primitive and aggressive sounds balanced by more subtle ambient textures, by the time he finished mixing the six new songs — each one exactly ten-minutes in length — he realized that he had made significant strides in evolving his recent style. Not Everybody Makes It functions as a sonic elegy to the countless losses that so many of us have suffered over the last year and in the recent past, and its shimmering and crumbling frequencies and textures enter into a tense balancing act with elusive melodies that slowly drown in and then emerge from the shifting and eroding dronescapes.
Offers SOLOTROFF of the solemn video, “It’s been difficult to view the devastating wildfires on the West Coast, over the last several years, and to not be moved by the widespread damage that they cause. During my last trip to Los Angeles, a friend who lives there pointed out vast stretches of scorched landscape as we drove along the expressway in his car, not all that far from Downtown, where I was staying. I’ve also lived through a fire in a former home in Chicago. There’s nothing like being woken up very early on a Sunday morning by neighbors pounding on your door, only to realize that half of your building is in flames. The distinct smell remained with me for a long time. Fire is a frightening but fascinating thing to see and to hear and I appreciate how it becomes very abstract, as you focus deeper on the dancing flames.
“‘Dancing,’ what a poetic word we use! Inspired by the legacy of experimental filmmakers who have been based in Chicago, from László Moholy-Nagy to Stan Brakhage, and Owen Land (who was actually my cousin; a progressively distant one, as far as my family history goes) to Lisa Slodki (AKA Noise Crush, whose work was exhibited by the Museum Of Contemporary Art and who collaborates with my bandmate Isidro Reyes and me, when we perform as The Fortieth Day), I created this abstract meditation on the destructive power of fire.”
View MARK SOLOTROFF’s “Return To Pleasure (Body Into Voice),” now playing at Cvlt Nation, at THIS LOCATION.
View SOLOTROFF’s previously released video for “Charged Matter (The Problem From The Inside)” HERE.
Not Everybody Makes It is available on CD, in a four-panel digipak featuring SOLOTROFF’s photography, and on all major digital platforms. Find orders via Bandcamp HERE or iTunes/Apple Music HERE where the record can be streamed in full.
MARK SOLOTROFF‘s artwork and music focuses on several related key themes, including how cities develop, both organically and through organized planning, how the human body navigates urban environments, and how people navigate and interact with each other, particularly in an age of alienation caused by severe digital fragmentation.
In the music world, SOLOTROFF is best known as the vocalist of both the doom band Anatomy Of Habit and the heavy electronic band Bloodyminded, and as the founder of the early post-industrial band Intrinsic Action. He also has a more than thirty-five-year history playing analog synthesizer. His synth work has been at the core of Bloodyminded and Intrinsic Action, and he recorded and released one-hundred hours of lo-fi analog synth music under the name Super Eight Loop, which he recently digitized and remastered. He is part of the dark-synth group Nightmares, which released a new album in early 2020, as well as the post-industrial trio, Ensemble Sacrés Garçons, which released their first new album in over twenty-five years, in early 2021.
SOLOTROFF has also collaborated with and contributed synth and/or vocals to numerous bands, ranging from a four-year role in Wrekmeister Harmonies, to live appearances and/or studio recordings with diverse electronic, experimental, and metal bands, including The Atlas Moth, Brutal Truth, Consumer Electronics, Indian, Locrian, Plague Bringer, Sigillum S, and The Sodality. In late 2019, SOLOTROFF‘s synth was included on new releases by Azar Swan (“The Hissing Crane” on Primal Architecture) and The Body (“Remixed” on Thrill Jockey), and in 2020, he created remixes, augmented with his synth, for Statiqbloom (“Asphyxia Remixed” on Synthicide) and Snow Burial (“Painting The Streets With Our Blood”).
“…Not Everybody Makes It is somber and deliberately restrained, meant to be played at a volume that allows the ambient sounds of the listener’s home to slip through… SOLOTROFF shapes sound into bite-size meditations that thread the needle between representing anxiety and soothing it. Much of his work is confrontational and violent, but he’s also a master of the elegiac (such as in Anatomy Of Habit), and that’s on full display throughout Not Everybody Makes It. Like much of the music I’ve heard from the past year and a half, its emotional perimeter has been shaped in part by solitude, grief, and worry… a beautiful, subtle record that will reward repeated listenings. – Chicago Reader
“SOLOTROFF focuses upon emotional states, as through chronicling a mix of anxiety and mourning. There’s space to immerse within the morose sounds that SOLOTROFF presents… it’s quietly surreal.” Captured Howls
“Themes of isolation have been prevalent in SOLOTROFF‘s recent work, with a series of eight tapes in the past few years (compiled earlier this year onto three 2CD volumes as the Strategic Planning series), but while those captured a sense of urban loneliness and anomie, Not Everybody Makes It is more personal and introspective. Besides the intentional imagery conveyed by the title, the hushed volumes and pseudo-melodies (not something often associated with his work) lock on to this sense of loneliness and despair.” – Brainwashed
“SOLOTROFF’s ear for sound is more unique than most. A listen to this record may inspire a new way of thinking and appreciating noise; a ponder into the authenticity of sound regarding what we consider to be music.” – Distorted Sound
“This collection was in part SOLOTROFF’s response to the emergence of the pandemic last year, a set of circumstances that intensified the significance of the themes with which his work is usually concerned – how people navigate and interact with each other, particularly in an age of alienation caused by severe digital fragmentation, how cities develop and how the human body navigates urban environments. Taking this into account the layers of stillness, movement, fragility, ambivalence, menace, and unease wrapped in the strata of glassy, metallic drone make sense. This is a very beautiful yet disquieting collection that SOLOTROFF has created, perfect for our times.” – The Sleeping Shaman
“Those who like their ambient music to be dark, dystopian, and minimalist in nature should have a very good chance of finding this album to be quite the rewarding experience.” – The Viking In The Wilderness
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