<#000000 by #000000

#000000 is the solo project of electronic drone artist Marc Kate, and finds him deviating from his usual ambient realism, instead veering into a howling abyss of crushing, bleak and blackened, corrupted dub techno.

<#000000 is Kate's first dizzying diversion as #000000 – a creeping, stuttering exploration of deep dub space, a damaged take on the Basic Channel / Chain Reaction template, fusing the suffocating black ambience of Lustmord, the drone-dirge of Sunn O))) and the subterranean club music throb of Pole, Monolake and the like.

Not so much individual tracks, as sprawling expanses of rumble and thrum, some smeared with glistening streaks of effervescent treble, others draped over buried tectonic pulsations. The sound is surprisingly melodic without sacrificing any inherent menace.

Fields of warped sine waves are molded into woozy modulated swells, which decay into bristled shards of crumble and grit, a sound that has as much in common with doom metal as Detroit techno. Kate's minimal rhythmic palette (only kicks) wraps clouds of tarnished grime in blurred and bleary skeletal outlines.

<#000000 is a nullwave transmission from a dark concrete bunker, a muted sonic howl from a horror movie set, power ambient influenced by Lawrence English and Ben Frost but whittled down to its grim, black essence, a Caretaker-like hazy outline of techno, as if V/Vm’s The Death of Rave weren’t dead enough.

It's a mutated swath of dubbed-out shoegaze, dripping with tar, a pitch black field of pulse and throb, mournful, dislocated, abstract, spirited away and laid bare, a bleak expanse of harrowing, hypnotic horror, an inward gazing and rhapsodic suite of sinewy, muted, mutated melancholia.

#000000 (along with My Heart, An Inverted Flame and Boszorkánysziget) are part of the phoenix-like re-emergence of the tUMULt label in 2024 (celebrating its silver anniversary after a long dormant stretch)...

tUMULt arise!

RIYL:
Deathprod, Pole, SHXCXCHCXSH, Fluxion, Sunn O))), Maurizio, Klara Lewis, Monolake, The Automatics Group, Gas, Ben Frost, Kassel Jaeger, Seefeel, Stephan Mathieu, Matt Jencik, Kevin Richard Martin, Coil, T++, Thomas Köner, Haxan Cloak, Porter Ricks, EVP, William Basinski

#000000 is Marc Kate, an electronic musician based in San Francisco who focuses on what he calls “ambient realism.” He is half of the prolific synth doom duo My Heart, an Inverted Flame with Andee Connors, and half of new age-damaged kosmische project Driftloss with Colin Marston. #000000, his newest project, is based on corrupted dub techno textures.