Xander Harris has just released The New Dark Age of Love via Not Not Fun, and on the outstanding new record he continues to expand upon his post-apocolyptic synthwave visions to deliver another noir installment of Urban Gothic. Inspired by his love of Italian horror films and the brutal, graphic novels of Brian Keene, as well as musicians like Chris Carter, Tangerine Dream, Cabaret Voltaire, and Skinny Puppy, the Austin, TX-based artist creates elegant, techno dreams of a future past, full of slasher film camp and the ennui of nostalgia.
While Xander Harris is often included with analogue synth-based musicians like Dylan Ettinger, Jon Maus, Oneohtrix Point Never, and others, one of the elements that makes Harris’ music unique is his use of an electronic drum set to create his rhythms, giving the music a looser, human sound. And yet the tracks on The New Dark Age of Love are definitely haunted by a certain creep factor that seems to lie in the nostalgic aire they conjure. Xander Harris has pursued his passion for the by-gone era of the analogue synth with an almost religious zeal, to achieve in tone and feel a classic, museum quality to his music. He creates the sounds a past time when synthesizer music might have suggested, without irony, a more harmonious melding of machine and human, a New Age of Love, say, and by applying the filter’s of critique and hindsight, amends that future to something more ominous, The New Dark Age of Love. Is this the end of the journey, or just the end?
