Multi-disciplinary artist Ari Russo bends the visual detritus of our immediate past and DIY lines of code into sneakily gorgeous instrumentals and eerily disaffected videos.
Russo closed out 2014 listed amongst XLR8R’s top 50 tracks of the year and manning groundbreaking 3D visuals for Torn Hawk and UK duo Psychemagik in London.
Pressure Palace, Russo's first single/video for New Ancestors, adds skittering electric guitars and chiming harmonics to the outstanding synth-led workouts of the Wild Metals EP (Valcrond Video, 2014). It’s an altogether more human realization couched in static and tightly propulsive.
Pressure Palace is a wild outgrowth of sub-realities and subliminal desire, a close look at the secret sex-life of objects and a sardonic glare at the authoritarian over-stimulation of modern life. Images are culled from his deep archive of VHS and laserdiscs through his self-made VZ program. The result is an ephemeral cinema of dystopian erotica and consumption set to a slow-pulsing futurist soundscape.
The single is paired with Aqua Vitae, a previously un-released video amalgam of distorted and hypnotic synth work accumulated between 2005-2008, "touching on tape-manipulation textures and fuzzy Boards of Canada environments; and, stick around until the end and you’ll even get some erotic-painting NSFW action.Tiny Mix Tapes
“Russo’s music captures the human interface between manmade textures and bodily life... emotionally gripping as it is texturally weird.” -Dazed Digital
“...heavier and more technoid than your typical home-listening electronica; it balances between genuine expressiveness and purposeful anonymity." -Spin
“Through the eyes of NYC video artist, programmer and musician Russo, the world is cast as a spinning menagerie of artifacts...” -The Fader
“placid, frond-filled corporate lounges and other atmospheric exotica... popping up periodically as the starkest invocation of the same sense of networked universalism that fills his music" -Decoder
"You might get pulled into the same daze." -No Fear Of Pop
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