If you wanted your Friday to be a tad macabre, then you’ve clicked the right link. Today’s premiere is a powerhouse of electronics, synths, and off-putting vibes, but only the best for our readers.
Zen Mother are a Brooklyn-based industrial-tinged dark/synthpop outfit composed of Monika Khot and Adam Wolcott. They are poised to make your body writhe well into the weekend with their latest single and video sourced from a new album coming up called Millennial Garbage Preach. Today’s visual and aural treat is called “Order” and you can experience it right here, right now:
Wild, huh? There’s a very interesting backstory to it all:
‘The story is inspired by a true American socialite Edith Bouvier Beale who also known as Little Edie. They are the shorthand for evoking lost high-society splendor where found inside an lost mansion called Grey Gardens. Deep in a provincial region of northwestern Turkey, it looks like the Grey Gardens mirage: hundreds of luxury houses built in neat rows, their pointed towers somewhere between French chateaux and Disney castle left to rot. This Turkish ghost town is like a fairytale gone wrong.‘
The video certainly lends itself to a post-decay happily-ever-after where a princess of some sort was left to her own devices and decided to entrench herself in the leftover scenery not so much to live, but to haunt even in corporeal form. Nothing is as it once was, including the young lady who contorts and stretches to abnormal degrees with an expressive dance and possible cry for help. The scope of the location is keenly felt once the camera pans out at the end, showing those rowed homes with jutting towers defiantly pointing to the sky almost mockingly, and it’s then you realize the gravity of the waste and derelict status of what was once a surely beauteous and intriguing place.
The music of Zen Mother is mechanical and slightly threadbare, focusing on those pumping rhythms found in the most canny industrial efforts around. They mold a variety of synths and guitars around that steel skeleton providing slow, angular melodies. Drums peck around the track like the roach’s legs do at the beginning of the video against the eroded and cracked concrete of the dilapidated home. Vocals are siren-like; enticing and vaguely deadly all at once. The track escalates cleanly in intensity, but never enough to break concentration as if actually soundtracking the dancing of Asli Melisa Uzun in real-time.
Zen Mother know their way around ambience – even divorced from its compelling video, there’s a lot of dark accents that leave a pool of dread in your heart after listening to it. If you were also intrigued by their music, I’d urge you to make a connection with the band through Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. You can also check out their previous work on their own Bandcamp, and preorder Millennial Garbage Preach through their label Weyrd Son Records‘ Bandcamp. It comes out on May 6!
Band photo by Ebru Yildiz
