Sometimes it’s hard keeping up with all the great releases coming from the Blackest Ever Black label, but we sure have fun trying! Stuart Argabright’s Black Rain project returns in August with Dark Pools, the artist’s first studio album in eighteen years. Argabright came on our radar with BEB‘s 2011 release of Now I’m Just A Number: Soundtracks 1994-95, a compilation of tracks initially produced for Robert Longo’s movie adaptation of William Gibson‘s short story Johnny Mnemonic, before the soundtrack was ditched in place of some flavorless Hollywood version.
BEB reports that the musician arrived in NY City in 1978, and while he made his living by day as a landscape gardner for the likes of Rock Hudson and Bob Dylan, he would also go onto co-found the minimalist no-wave band Ike Yard, as well as future forward projects like Death Comet Crew and Dominatrix. In addition, Argabright was a consummate student of science fiction-his father worked at the Pentagon helping to develop an early version of the internet-and driven by these interests, the young artist would enter into a correspondence with William Gibson in 1984, just prior to the author’s release of his seminal cyber-punk novel Neuromancer. The two would later meet at Biosphere 2, a research facility set up by the University of Arizona to study space colonization!
Today we check out the track “Endourban“, which formerly appeared on Black Rain’s 2013 live EP Protoplasm, but for Dark Pools, the cut receives a more expansive treatment, accentuating it’s dystopian atmospherics. Having drained the last drops of funk from techno, the beat slithers and slurs at a paranoid pace, while crushing bass pounds and shards of urban menace pierce and rumble thru the soundscape with a frighteningly visceral magnitude!
