satellite cult 38.38

executive confessions, CTRLFR33K, meandyke

Aug 04, 2023

welcome to this week’s satellite cult dispatch. i’m so glad you’re here. i hope the artifacts i present you with will summon a nightmare where you’re thrust onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 1989. groups of traders in grey and navy suits mob you to steal your bright and colorful clothes, ripping you apart down to your skin, until a new you emerges: Hamtaro.

please be aware that the void dive section below contains flashing gifs. if you’re viewing this on the website, forgive the way Substack formats some Bandcamp embeds.

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grandeur hotel

Airbnb has spent the last 15 years ruining affordable housing, but its comparatively less expensive rates made hotels feel like a thing of the past to the young and broke—there is a specific type of nostalgia associated with hotels, be it glamour shots in movies or a family of four packed into a room at the Holiday Inn circa 1998. something about them is both commercial and luxurious, cheap and also elevated.

this album by delaberry, out on Toronto-based net label Utopia District, captures a type of 80s travel opulence--a stay in a four-star establishment after the raise you spent years begging for finally bumped you from business flights to first class. enjoy a taste of decadence while you remind yourself why you want to eat the rich.

executive confessions

also out on Utopia District is executive confessions by Xenon Masters. last week, i turned you on to some officewave by Emotari, and this album takes it a step further, conjuring the corporate ladder-climbing late night lo-fi love story of two painfully uncool yuppies spending their stock market money on luxury vacations, Michelin star diners, and the Republican party, all while blasting yacht rock from the speakers of their sports car.

ヴァレリー

yearning and regret go hand in hand—the understanding of i should have done this bursting from the melancholy and aching want of not having the thing your decision cost you. maybe you wish you bolted down the sidewalk after them, the street lights casting stripes and shadows before you, crying “wait, don’t go!” into the black hole of a city night. this album by DΛRKNΣSS, released on Doki Doki Beats, is what happens afterwards as you traverse an abandoned urban wilderness after skyscraper lights have dimmed and shops have shuttered their windows.

LOW HP

there is something unsettling about experiencing the throws of fantasy alongside signs of obsolete analog technology. this vaporware-inspired dungeon synth catapults you into a sword and sorcery RPG as the undulating pull of an aging VHS’s audio warping underwrites the tracks. in places it feels like a darker, more atmospheric, haunting take on Mother Earth's Plantasia by Mort Garson.

Soul Resonance

the choppiness in this EP by utopicangel adds a degree of anxiety to what is otherwise ambient trance and breakcore. the sense of distress is subtle and searching, and it feels punctuated by small icy, rolling tones that act as little frost-bitten kisses throughout. it’s also surprisingly short—the longest of the five tracks clocks in at under two minutes, and the shortest is 26 seconds, a bittersweet palette cleanser you’d rather consume on its own.

I still love you

the latest by CTRLFR33K is a haunting hard trance EP with soft melodic interludes and early 2000s Square Enix undertones. hope, melancholy, and determination all live in these tracks, fighting one another for the chance to rise to the surface.

kvltcore

kvltcore by urfavdepressedwaifu is the only release on the entirety of Bandcamp tagged black metal dnb, and while i’ve heard music that blends metal, hardcore, or grindcore with EDM, i haven’t heard anything that sounds quite like this.

AmyReal Agenda FuckWorld 2013 ElectroHexD Domination Gay (DatPiff Exclusive)

the best meme music takes itself just seriously enough, but not so seriously that it stops being meme, and this hexed footwork jungle by AmyReal strikes the right chord.

wiby

if you don’t know about wiby.me, it’s a search engine that largely excludes the contemporary internet—it was built to search the classic web.

queer web archives

regulars here know i love a queer web archive, and recently i found myself revisiting the Queer Zine Archive Project, an online archive founded in 2003, when the word queer still had some political bite. queer only barely holds the subversive power it used to—the reclaimed slur has come to signal an aesthetic more than anything else, with capitalists and bootlickers proudly laying claim to it.

a majority of the archive’s zines were printed in the 90s and early 2000s, but the oldest in the collection is from 1974. queerness has become so sanitized that it feels refreshing to get lost in the pages of anger, depravity, and liberation, photocopied by hand and distributed for free or cheap by mail order, in music venues, and in community spaces.