Somewhere between a warehouse dance floor and the inside of a malfunctioning fax machine lives the kind of music that makes your shoulders jerk before your brain catches up. Dot Wall out of Albuquerque and Absolute Form from Indianapolis clearly understand that impulse. Their split cassette: four tracks total, two per side, issued on pink or yellow tape like a fluorescent artifact from some basement bunker, lands with the physical thump of classic Electronic Body Music, the kind that used to rattle concrete and keep bartenders wide-eyed until sunrise.
You can hear the old bloodline running through it: Portion Control, Clock DVA, Cabaret Voltaire, Front Line Assembly, Front 242, the early synthetic fever of Skinny Puppy. Those ghosts hover in the machinery here, though the record doesn’t feel like a museum exhibit. Vintage synths cough and groan, drum machines clatter with stiff-backed authority, and the basslines move with a loose-limbed funkiness that gives the tracks their hips. Industrial music sometimes forgets it once had rhythm; this tape remembers.
Dot Wall’s half carries the strange charisma of a lone operator who has spent too many nights staring into blinking equipment. The project, a solo mutant from Albuquerque, pushes minimal-wave instincts toward heavier terrain. You picture the live show while listening: masked anonymity, a body moving with mechanical glee, a dance floor coaxed into reckless motion. The lyrics circle around what the artist calls “Electronic Body Miscreation,” which sounds like something scribbled in a lab notebook after three sleepless days and a dangerous amount of caffeine. Pleather, silicon, chains – props that promise spectacle while the machines grind out their sly, crooked groove.
“I wanted to channel older funky industrial stuff, fusing both human aggression and machine groove,” they say.
Absolute Form approaches the form from another angle. This project leans into discipline and tension, channeling the muscular momentum of early EBM through modern industrial weight. The beats land with blunt certainty, the vocals bark with street-corner agitation, and the whole thing carries the feeling of a factory line suddenly deciding to dance.
The artists themselves are refreshingly plainspoken about what they’re chasing. “I wanted to have these tracks harken back to the golden age of EBM that felt primal and danceable, with lyrics that bring light to hypocrisies against humanity in a punk kind of way,” they say.
Even the visuals play along. Infinity Plus Two supplies imagery inspired by vintage video synths and analogue mixers, the kind of wobbling electronic colour fields that once filled late-night public-access broadcasts. It suits the record perfectly. This split tape feels like a transmission dragged out of some forgotten rack of gear: loud, strange, and oddly joyful. Get groovin’.
Listen to Split Tape below and order the album here.
SPLIT TAPE W/ ABSOLUTE FORM by Dot Wall
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