Deathbomb Arc celebrates our 28th anniversary with 4 important acts to the label from across the years!
Lana Del Rabies
Ted Hearne + Taylor Levine + BAKUDI SCREAM
Miguel Mendez
Jonathan Snipes (of clipping.)
Lana Del Rabies, conceived by multi-disciplinary artist Sam An, is a captivating force in underground dark electronic and fringe heavy music. Merging industrial, gothic noise, and metal with experimental elements, Lana Del Rabies explores the esoteric brutality of what it means to be human in a world consumed by the threat of apocalypse. She is known for her intense and immersing live performances that hold the audience in captive catharsis. Her music is inherently tied to the worlds she builds visually, through the creation and direction of videos, visual art, photography and live music experiences.
Jonathan Snipes is a composer and sound designer for Film, Television and Theater living in Los Angeles. He teaches sound design in the theater and film departments at UCLA, and is a member of the rap group clipping. His recent scores include Yule Log 2 for Adult Swim, House of Ninjas for Netflix, and both seasons of Batman Unburied.
With his new album FARMING (out this fall via Deathbomb Arc), Ted Hearne — the composer and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist praised by Pitchfork for creating “some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory” — confronts technology’s ominous encroachment upon humanity’s very being. Created in collaboration with the GRAMMY-winning choir The Crossing, FARMING tackles the long-tail impact of settler colonialism and its philosophical motivations on agricultural degradation, big tech utopianism, corporate religiosity, and the abstraction of community.
Hearne dives headfirst into the Uncanny Valley, conjuring a soundworld fraught with neck-breaking shifts and stylistic contradictions. Its unholy marriage of ersatz Americana, digitally altered choral arrangements, and hyperpop’s synapse-frying maximalism inverts technology’s smoothing impulses in favor of an unwieldy, knotty expression of modern ennui and alienation.
Upon its 2023 live performance debut, The New York Times called FARMING “a suggestive, chaotically ambitious, often poignant reflection on colonization, consumption, marketing, entrepreneurship.” It’s certainly intellectually audacious: In repurposing primary texts from William Penn and Jeff Bezos, FARMING contends with the mythological constructs humans erect to justify their participation in an economy’s unfeeling entropies — and reveals the ethical void at their core.
Rohan Chander (a.k.a BAKUDI SCREAM) is a media artist and electronic musician based in the United States. Described as “hypersensory” (Washington Post), “remarkably alive” (The Wire Magazine), and of “transcendent metamorphosis” (I Care If You Listen), Chander’s work considers questions of postcoloniality in the diaspora through hindoo historical research and speculative fiction. Built on the creative practices of DJs and long form composition, his work manifests as cyberpunk performance art pieces with costumes, dance, music, and light. \ \ Rohan’s ensemble work has been commissioned by organizations such as the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Matt Marks Impact Fund. His works have been performed by Yarn/Wire, International Contemporary Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Chromic Duo, So Percussion, Vicky Chow, and at the Donaueschingen Festival. BAKUDI SCREAM won the 2022 Guadeamus Prize for Music Composition for his debut solo album, FINAL SKIN on Cantaloupe Music. He has received fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the California Council for the Arts, and support from Mid Atlantic Arts, REDCAT NOW, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Ernst von Siemens Foundation, the Netherlands-American Foundation, and others.\ \ Rohan is active as an electronic and keyboard artist, and has performed notably on several works by GRAMMY and Pulitzer nominated composer Ted Hearne, including ‘over and over vorbei nicht vorbei’ with Komische Oper Berlin, ‘Place’ at the LA Phil and CAL Performances, ‘The Source’ at Festival Musica Strasbourg, and ’Dorothea’ at Carnegie Hall.
Taylor Levine is a New York based guitarist and circuit designer working across the experimental, improvised and composed music communities. He’s made music and recorded with a diverse range of artists such as John Zorn, Lee Ronaldo, Yuka Honda, Steve Reich, Yo La Tengo, Marc Ribot, Nels Cline, Meredith Monk, Erykah Badu, Ted Hearne, Steve Miller, and ensembles including Komische Opera Berlin, Kronos Quartet, London Sinfonietta, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Ensemble Signal, and Alarm Will Sound.
Taylor has been invited to perform at festivals and venues such as Carnegie Hall in New York, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Vértice Festival in Mexico City, Royal Albert Hall and Sound Unbound Festival at Barbican Centre in London, Casa da Musica in Porto, Jazz em Agosto in Lisbon, Musica Festival at Le Maillon in Strasbourg, Sacrum Profanum in Kraków, Borealis Festival in Bergen, Norway, The Fringe Club in Hong Kong, City Recital Hall in Sydney, and Melbourne Recital Hall in Melbourne.
Taylor founded and co-directs the electric guitar quartet, Dither, whose music making has been described by the New York Times as "sophisticated, hard-driving, and stylistically omnivorous." In addition to touring, composing, producing and commissioning original work, Dither has held visiting artist residencies at Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, and NYU.
