click to enlarge - Courtesy
- Starvation Wages, Marketplace Fear
(Starvation Records, digital, vinyl)
Former Seattle musician Jason Dean, now based in Burlington, created his new project, Starvation Wages, with an ethos in mind: "Either explicitly or implicitly, all techno and industrial music is protest music," Dean wrote in the press release for the project's debut EP, Marketplace Fear.
An album full of politically charged samples, throbbing industrial beats and rage to spare, Marketplace Fear is Dean's chronicle of the destruction wrought by late-stage capitalism. An agoraphobic, Dean has amassed all of his frustrated and fearful responses to what he calls a "cutthroat dystopian free market" and pared them down into five tracks of hard-hitting techno music.
A former indie rocker with the Seattle band Mutiny Mutiny, Dean went all in on synths and samples, channeling acts such as Throbbing Gristle and Ministry to create a gritty, ultra-aggressive and paradoxically danceable brand of electronic music.
Beat poet Allen Ginsberg helps kick off the lead single, "Anatomized." A sample of his oft-quoted lines "America when will we end the human war? / Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb" becomes the bedrock of a ferocious club banger. As the beat builds over a vamping synth, Dean adds layer after layer to the mix until the song is a cacophonous blast of frenetic energy.
"Occupy-Revolt" follows with a massive, club-ready beat, almost shading into the territory of British rave kings the Chemical Brothers. The song sounds like a digital file being corrupted in real time, the notes and blips from the samples derezzing around the kind of beat that could cause a seizure. It's a post-punk take on techno, a collection of pristine, head-nod-inducing tracks all scarred by Dean's fury at the collapse of American society.
"Dystopia or Utopia, we'll decide," Dean wrote in the liner notes for Marketplace Fear. "In the meantime, the longtime Anarchist slogan provides constant inspiration: Another world is possible!"
Such glimpses of hope are few and far between on the record, however. "Surveillance Capitalism" opens with a sample of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress. As Dean builds the tension with breakbeats and a looping circle of fifths, the synth arpeggios flying by like a digital readout of a countdown, the track gets progressively more doom-laden.
Even though the record is a first-time effort, its production is pristine. Produced by Dean, Marketplace Fear was mixed and mastered by Brandon Busch at Sound Media Productions in Seattle. Dean and Busch keep their hands steady on the tiller of this explosive work full of massive beats and distorted synths, crafting a sonically adventurous record that never flags as the dynamics of the music shift.
Maybe everything is falling apart and the world is going straight to shit — who am I to say? But if the soundtrack to the Great American Collapse is a killer EDM record that goes this hard, I'm cool with it.
Marketplace Fear is streaming at starvationwages.bandcamp.com.