Dance Floor Drones: Black Meteoric Star

Russom debuts Black Meteoric Star tracks with Assume Vivid Astro Focus at Paris’ Super Festival in April, 2008 (part 2 below)


Former Arthur cover co-star Gavin Russom has new music coming out next week on DFA. He’s recording as Black Meteoric Star, and while the tunes are still rife with droning synthesizers — a la his essential Days of Mars work with Delia Gonzalez — he’s going for more of a dance floor vibe this time. Specifically, BMS is his exploration into acid house. He expands on that a bit in this 2008 interview with the UK’s Fact magazine:

“Later I became very interested in the thematic elements of early Detroit and Chicago electronic music and the cultural environments that surrounded the Warehouse. Of particular interest was the way that a piece of music technology (specifically the Roland TB-303) generated an entire musical aesthetic because of its characteristics and its limitations. The post-apocalyptic vision of a new society, armed with electronic technology, emerging from the post industrial wasteland resonated with my own political ideals, my experiences growing up in Providence and my interest in the post-WWI European avant-garde who had similar ideas.

“Of course I always come back to the fact that it’s simply interesting and powerful psychedelic music.”

The self-titled album’s out on June 9, but you can get a preview via Tim Sweeney’s “Beats In Space” radio broadcast from back in April. Russom opens with 30 minutes of BMS material, before going into a lovely DJ set including plenty of drones plus crusty voodoo folk-rock from Exuma and Archie Shepp’s “Monkey Blues.” Download the whole 90 minute podcast over at Beats In Space.

• More info on DFA’s MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/dfarecords

• Trinie Dalton interviewed Delia & Gavin for Arthur 21/March 2006, copies of which are still available in the Arthur Store. Click here to commence browsing.

• Assume Vivid Astro Focus made a sweet video for Delia & Gavin’s “Relevee”, which we posted back in April of 2008. Check it out by clicking here.