spirit ▲ shrine is my dark, witchy lo-fi electronic music project inspired by throbbing gristle, coil, swans, lingua ignota, the moon, noise, the early 2010 witch house scene, twin peaks, the occult, old horror films and radio shows, cosmic horror, chopped & screwed, cults, religion, and the undercurrents of myth and superstition in the american psyche.

it's the culmination of years of making electronic music and searching for a defining aesthetic that joins everything i was interested into one coherent entity. spirit ▲ shrine is the instrument, the theme, the technique the medium and the message. spirit ▲ shrine is the mother, the sea, the primordial pit pouring out her eldritch beauty into the third eye open to receive her chaos.

my current noise project, societal collapse is imminent!(scii), was born out of my own gender exploration and my newfound appreciation for the HNW scene. i still found myself incorporating rhythmic elements and i sort of liken it to a mix of proto industial meets power electronics meets ambient noise. inspirations include throbbing gristle, swans, chat pile, merzbow, yotzeret sheydim, emily aideen, chainlink mistress, rapace, courtney love, mouth wound, tympanic rupture, trans girls everywhere screaming to be accepted and estradiol.

i've had two other noise projects that predate scii, but none so meaningful to me as this one, each "song" emerging as a sort of cleansing ritual, designed to deprogram and decenter the foundations of white supremacy, misogyny, capitalism, colonizer mentality and other manifestations of hate and selfishness we carry with us. i think of the entire project as a spell of sorts, each subsequent incantation dissolving the layers of our fear and mistrust until nothing is left but love.

tangentbot was my first music project, started back in 1996 when a friend and i cobbled together my first computer; a 486 dx2 with a soundblaster awe64 gold soundcard, dos, and fasttracker 2 installed. at the time, all the music i made at the time was created in fasttracker 2 and mixed down in cool edit pro. it was video game inspired (we didn't have the word "chiptune" at the time) and drum and bass/industrial, and it sort of grew from there. my friends liked it, it got played at parties, but that was the extent of my ambition with this one.

a friend of mine, local rapper and country music star three ninjas, asked me if i could dj for him. so i incorporated my chiptune drum n bass style into his nerdy hiphop stuff and we were three ninjas and tangentbot. i finally got a taste of playing live shows. it felt like we did three or four shows a month; we kept busy, and all the while i was developing a new dark witchy electronica project on the side. i changed my name to t▲ngetbot for awhile during that transition, then a new entity emerged, one that persists to this day.

this is a custom synth i made using an atari punk console synth kit. a tiny speaker is mounted in front, the potentiometers control the sound shape, the red button pulses the sound on and off, and the switch turns it on and off. that little red light thing next to the switch is just a plastic i built it in a small sturdy cardboard box and collaged the outside of it. it sounds awful and i love it. i used it a lot when i performed with WIN95SE.

pretty simple, quick project here, but super useful. i just drilled a hole in an empty altoids box and installed a cheap piezo contact mic jack, and stuck the speaker on the lid. plug it into a mixer and it acts as a passive mic. (the inset image shows it open) i added a few screws so it amplifies the noise when you shake it, especially if you run it into delays and reverbs. i actually have since removed the screws, because i found if you crank the gain on the mixer the metal tin will pick up all sorts of noise. it's a fun little tool that gets a ton of use in my studio.

i made a full noise concept album (currently unreleased) that only uses these loop cassettes and a cassette recorder. they are kind of fussy to make, which is why i only have two, but essentially you open a cassette, measure and cut the amount of tape you want, splice the ends together and reassemble everything. if you line everything up well enough you get a tape that will record and loop a sample over and over. they are great for lo-fi noise, drone, cut-ups, basically anywhere you want to incorporate a little chaos. my noise project mentioned above gets a lot of use from these. element as well.

i was with a friend at a winco at like midnight, and we saw a big display bin full of these things for just five bucks each or something, so naturally i bought one. the drum samples are distorted and crunchy, so i disconnected the speaker and wired a 1/4 jack so i could run it through my pedal chain (i also deactivated the "demo" key because it was easy to accidentally hit and it'd treat you to an uninspired drum demo that you can't skip) i love this little thing, and have used it on many recordings as well as in a live setting.