Manchester, UK based electronic newcomers Overrider are pleased to reveal details of their debut mini-album, cyc|er, set for release on 15th May 2020. The record is available to preorder now on bandcamp: https://overrider.bandcamp.com/album/cyc-er-2
Featuring the talents of members of Cleft, Alpha Male Tea Party, and Giraffes? Giraffes!, cyc|er is an urgent, modern, and timely record which examines defiance in the face of depression and hopelessness, intensely relevant for the times we’re living through.
Lead single ‘Ansible’ is out now and available to stream or download on bandcamp https://overrider.bandcamp.com/album/ansible, accompanied by an official video: https://youtu.be/tANJr7I3aIE
Commenting on the single, their guitarist says: “This is probably our most aggressive track, and one of the more guitar heavy. There’s a lot going on—it was inspired by the live sound of bands like Massive Attack, where there’s all these layers of noise, percussion and sub bass that combine into this sonic assault.”
“This track is specifically about the period where you are cycling out of extreme depression. It’s about the inertia of recovery and how you need to communicate with others to pull through. It’s dark, but, like a lot of material on the record, it’s also defiant. Oh, and on a lighter note,” add the band, “we added the glockenspiel intro as a joke reference to 65daysofstatic. Great band.”
Taking influence elsewhere from Oceansize, NIN, and Curve, the record is “supposed to sound like a transmission from deep space,” say the band, “garbled and messed up”—as such, crushed voices, dark layers of noise, and a sinister atmosphere pervade throughout. Of the tracks on the record, ‘The Left Hand’, ‘Possibility Sword’, and ‘Black Hatch’ are perhaps the most electronic-leaning, often using manipulated textures and samples.
In bringing cyc|er—and its companion-piece, the tongue-in-cheek b-sides collection re|cycler—to life, the band enlisted their friends, drummer John Simm (formerly of ‘turbo-prog’ heroes Cleft), and producer Tom Peters (Alpha Male Tea Party). For the re-working of single ‘Possibility Sword’ on ‘re|cycler’, Joe Andreoli, the guitarist of cult math-rockers Giraffes? Giraffes! recorded all-new guitar takes.
The genesis of the project can be found in live-coding experiments using the Tidalcycles and Overtone libraries, as the band explain; “we spent years trying to come up with a way of using these random, algorithmic approaches to make something musical. In the end, the balance turned out to be using code to rip up samples and then adding traditional instrumentation over the top.”
“There’s a kind of hacker aesthetic to the whole project,” they continue, “which included things like track names in extended unicode. When we came to sharing finished songs with friends we found they crashed phone media players and all sorts. We had to re-name all the files and sanitize everything.”
cyc|er is released on 15th May 2020
