On A Violent Power and Bontempi Pop 3, Danz CM treats synthesizers less like collector’s trophies than working machinery, using vintage hardware to build pop that moves, mutates, and occasionally grins at its own oscillations. The equipment may be old, but the decisions feel immediate: basslines snap into position, keyboards dart through the margins, and every unusual texture seems enlisted because it can push the song somewhere useful.
A Violent Power is the straighter shot. Constructed entirely from analogue synths, it runs on a rigid new-wave pulse that suggests Kraftwerk’s immaculate engineering after somebody slipped a little danger into the control room. Berlin and Ladytron provide useful coordinates, particularly in the marriage of cool surfaces and emotional excess, yet Danz gives the track enough pressure to keep the references from swallowing it. The song concerns surrendering to an overpowering emotion, and the arrangement keeps tightening around that idea, adding momentum until submission starts sounding suspiciously pleasurable. Synth lines rise, retreat, and lock together with the tidy aggression of machinery designed for dancing.
Then Bontempi Pop 3 wanders into stranger territory and steals the double single. Its breakbeat shuffles with trip-hop weight while an Italian Bontempi toy organ squeaks, chirps, and zips across the track as though somebody left a children’s keyboard unsupervised in an experimental studio. Broadcast supplies some of its crooked sweetness, while the toy-box melodies carry the idyllic whimsy of Danish synth band Moral, and the repetition has Stereolab’s playful momentum. Just this side of psychedelia, the arrangement keeps producing small surprises without turning into a crowded demonstration of gear. The subject is time: specifically, the desire to escape its disappearing act by occupying the present more completely. That could easily become heavy-handed philosophy, but Danz wisely gives the idea movement rather than solemnity. The beat keeps walking forward while those peculiar keyboards seem determined to distract the clock.
Together, the singles reveal a musician with enough technical command to know that technical command is boring when displayed for its own sake. Live guitars, acoustic drums, motorik rhythms, layered vocals, and banks of synthesizers enter according to function rather than prestige, allowing touches of Nation of Language, Chromatics, Ladytron, Stereolab, and Broadcast to flash past without turning the songs into record-collection bookkeeping.
A Violent Power provides the immediate hook, but Bontempi Pop 3 supplies the mischief. One is streamlined and commanding; the other keeps poking holes in its own geometry.
Listen to A Violent Power/Bontempi Pop 3 below or via the streaming service of your choice here:
Originally from New York’s Catskill Mountains and now based in Los Angeles, Danz CM first built an audience during the 2010s as Computer Magic, operating with a staunch DIY approach that eventually produced records including 2015’s Davos and led to considerable success in Japan, where her music appeared in campaigns for Panasonic and Kewpie Mayo. After retiring the Computer Magic name, she moved further into composition and instrumental arrangement, scoring independent films including While Mortals Sleep and Gary Hustwit’s The Map. During the pandemic she also founded Synth History, the print publication devoted to synthesizers, electronic music, and the people behind them, while continuing to write, produce, mix, art-direct, and release music through her own Channel 9 Records. Recent releases have moved from the ambient abstractions of MYTHS to the krautrock excursions of 2025’s LÄRM!, alongside tours supporting LCD Soundsystem and Ladytron.
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Photography by Max Flick
The post Retro Synthpop Artist Danz CM Shares Double Single “A Violent Power” and “Bontempi Pop 3” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
