Experiment Haywire: Cooler than Genocide

Thanks to the internet, I’ve been aware of the progression of Rachel Haywire’s sound from early audio experiments to the chaos of Nuclear Riot Party, and thought I knew what to expect from this ep, mixed and mastered at Mindswerve Studios in NYC, produced by Xris Flam. I was wrong.

I’ll be honest, I was expecting noise, experimental soundscapes, avant-garde assault on pop music… I expected a dark industrial doom–but I didn’t expect it to be danceable, and as a result, so damn subversive. Then again Haywire is never what you’d expect. It starts with People Killing People, moves into Game Called Life, blows through Decapitation of the Nation, and both summarizes and reiterates the theme again with Cooler than Genocide, but it is more than a four song ep. It’s a harbinger of things to come, a dark industrial space that picks up where Nitzer Ebb left off years ago.

NRP seemed to actually break music, rooting out the bare bones of what a performance meant to an audience, then snapping the assumptions systematically, setting the bones aflame, then dancing in the ashes. Now I suspect that was a learning process, and she’s taken those sensibilities and re-framed that passion into thick, fat beats and textured audio complexity that could easily sneak its way into any dj’s club mix… And it should. It’s a good thing to see such a fiercely creative woman generating dark industrial minus the gothy-emo undertones.

This isn’t a full album, it’s a four song ep. There’s every sign that she’s not stopping either, this isn’t a summation of her talents, it’s an opening statement, with more than a dash of glitter and pain and with her technical skills and production values growing exponentially, her sound is filling a void that has remained empty for far too long. She’s already released two tracks from the upcoming full-length album Annihilation Chic, proving that this ep was no fluke, and that there’s much more to come.

Speaking of more to come, listen for the upcoming interview with Rachel I have coming up on the next Gspot, and until then check out what she’s doing with her new label, machineKunt. You can check out the track Decapitation (of the Nation) on her myspace profile, (as well as the two new tracks from her upcoming album), and here’s the video for “Game Called Life”, directed by S.G. Lords: