Mermaid & Seafruit is the Vienna-based duo composed of the Polish artist, performer, and singer Magdalena Chowaniec and the Austrian producer, DJ, and artist Markus Steinkellner. Started in early 2015, their project has been focused on the interaction between a multitude of electronic music styles such as hardcore techno, grime, noise, and many more, with vocal-oriented genres like hip hop, r&b, and spoken word – all wrapped up in adrenaline-driven, raw-energy instances reproducing the thrill of the live music act.
Their latest effort is the 7-track album called Screens Are My New Clothes, out on 29th July 2021 on the local label Ashida Park which you might already be familiar with if you’ve been reading our entries in the recent past (have a look here, and here). So far the most articulate outing in their artistic journey, the record collects various inputs the duo have been meddling with over the last 6 years in the shape of scorching, impactful tunes that will surely make it hard for you to keep on the chair.
Indebted with performance art, and well-established in the contemporary Viennese music scene, Mermaid & Seafruit use their visceral take on musical hybridization as if their life depended on it, with stunning results indeed. In their record, devastating hardcore kickdrums meet as effortlessly as air with ethereal, auto-tuned vocals; super-saw, hardstyle-inspired synths offer the perfect framework for abrupt, skramz-like screams; and obsessive, eerie trance melodies appear to be just the perfect scenario where to place dissonant rhythmic experiments.
Screens Are My New Clothes evolves as a sensuous longing for touch, liveness, collective negotiations, and the three-dimensionality of sound and movement. […] Songs that call for the physical turn in society and for the alliances of care, criticizing the exclusivity of philosophic futurism, and praising the metamorphic body living in-between.
Since the beginning, M & S‘s productions have also been offering a straightforward, unapologetic commentary on contemporary, late-stage capitalist society and the pandemic oppression that burdens our bodies, our emotional and mental well-being, and closes off our chances at a bright future. To this end, and more than ever with Screens Are My New Clothes, Magdalena and Markus’ music provides a series of outstanding musical stimuli that work as an outlet to express unspoken feelings and unmanifested energy. A poignant, sore call to action: let’s redirect our rage, let’s weaponize our anger.
Via the SoundCloud player above, you can now stream the opening, eponymous track of the Screens Are My New Clothes release, the 22nd on the Viennese platform, mastered by Adam Matej and coming with album artwork by Magdalena Fischer and Magdalena Chowaniec herself. In the composition, the ferocious, on-top-of-the-lungs vocals by Magdalena move over loud vs soft dynamics obtained via the juxtaposition of distorted kicks and massive rave synths. You can already pre-order the record at this link, but first:
Follow Mermaid & Seafruit on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and Instagram. Support Ashida Park on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and Instagram.
Press pic by Magadelena Fischer
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We are a non-profit organization registered in December 2018, operating since late 2015 as a webzine and media website. In early 2017, we started our own event series focused on arts, experimental, and dancefloor-oriented music. We reject every invocation to “the Future” meant as the signifier for capitalistic “progress” and “innovation”, fully embracing the Present instead; we renounce any reckless and ultimately arbitrary division between “high” and “low”, respectable and not respectable, “mind” and “body”; we support and invite musicians, artists, and performers having diverse backgrounds and expressing themselves via variegated artistic practices.