This Friday, Brooklyn, New York-based ambient/experimental solo artist, MEGALOPHOBE, will release Music For Resistance Fantasies through Nefarious Industries. The album is a cinematic soundscape and backing score created for a live improvisational dance performance which took place in Brooklyn in 2019. CVLT Nation is now hosting an exclusive advance streaming the entire album.
MEGALOPHOBE is the solo venture of one Benjamin Levitt, composed primarily of effects-laden ambient and experimental accordion passages, infused with vocals, guitars, keys, pedal effects, field recordings, and more. The Music For Resistance Fantasies album was fully performed, recorded, and mixed by Levitt at his Forked Audio in Brooklyn, the album then mastered by David Salierno, and completed with photos by Levitt and Jon Burklund/Zanni Video, and layout/design by David Brenner/Gridfailure.
Levitt offers, “The idea here was to make an ambient score for a dance without rhythm, keeping it dark but not aggressive, trippy but not making a big deal about melting faces. It didn’t make any sense, so it was perfect. The six tracks were named for notes I made during some early rehearsals that were mostly meant as signposts for me during the improvised bits. By the end, I had thought of them by those notes for so long, changing their names seemed wrong. So now they’re signposts for everyone, encouraging some directions our much-needed escapism might take. I wanted to be able to reproduce these tracks live so I wrote most of the tracks with just the modified accordion – sometimes chanted into, knocked on, and scraped across – and a looper. And except for a bit of this and that here and there, that’s what you hear on the album. The live events were in a warehouse space where I was using the amps, the high ceilings, the concrete as another layer of reverb, fed back through the signal chain, via the bellows, and out again – I tried to get some of that vibe in the recorded versions. It’s only pretending to be a quiet album – play it loud!”
CVLT Nation writes, “Listening to the performance piece written by MEGALOPHOBE’s Benjamin Levitt, entitled Music For Resistance Fantasies, it’s like I’m hearing the presence of my resistance as it lives in my belly, heart, and mind. It’s constant, kind of soothing, kind of unsettling, like the rolling thunder above our heads and under our feet, reminding me of my truth when I try to look away from it. I need to escape into it instead, and that’s what this music is allowing me to do.”
Hear MEGALOPHOBE’s entire Music For Resistance Fantasies score early only through CVLT Nation now at THIS LOCATION.
Nefarious Industries will release Music For Resistance Fantasies this Friday, December 18th on cassette in a limited run of 50 copies and through all digital providers available at the label landing page HERE.
MEGALOPHOBE’s thirty-seven-minute Music For Resistance Fantasies serves as an audio accompaniment to a live, somewhat improvised, dance troupe performance last year. Levitt states, “This music was composed and recorded for Marion Storm’s Resistance Fantasies, Strategies For Moving Toward — And Against, performed at the Target Margin Theater in Brooklyn, New York as part of the 2019 Exponential Festival. As Marion put it, ‘a three-hour-long dance performance full of scores, group action, live composition, and deep listening. As the performers of this work, our attention is always on our layered, conflicting, complicated frame which is resistance. Our resistance fantasies. Or sometimes not fantasies, the real thing.’”
MEGALOPHOBE is immersed in the creation of a new album, the outfit’s third collaborative album with Gridfailure, and more to be announced over the months ahead.
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