AidriftSignals Exclusive Interview: A Fireside Chat at the Edge of Time with James Spectrum of Pepe Deluxé, as We Discuss Their New Twin EPs, Age of Wunder I and Age of Wunder Part B!

Pepe Deluxé Interview

After 2024's mega-collage LP Comix Sonix, psychedelic rock-pop-spare time machinists Pepe Deluxé have a few more tricks up their sleeves. 

These guys have been a genre bending powerhouse for 3, count it, 3 decades! Their humble beginnings and early formation of sounds could be heard on their 1999 hip-hop, stylish debut Super Sound. The 21st century wasn't ready though, because they continued on with more fresh works with Beatitude in 2003 and then another complete (r)evolution in 2007's Spare Time Machine. 2012 was another figurative “awakening” as they made waves with their esoteric pop opera told in 3 parts, Queen of The Wave, which netted them the “best album since the Big Bang” which I just made up, and then after what seemed like ages, 2021’s reintroduction Phantom Cabinet Vol. 1.

As we connected through these interconnected tubes we all call the "Internet," James (or Jari) and I were discussing the massive super sounds Pepe Deluxé has amassed over their 30-year span...

System of A Down's Toxicity is 25! Their song Aerials though is timeless...

It's about time we talk about SOAD's heavy metal grail, Aerials

 

September of this year marked the 25th anniversary of System of A Down’s essential album Toxicity, less than a week before 9/11. Prison Song is one of those defining moments during the peak of the prison industrial complex, and the war on drugs and a looming police state were things that people could feel in the air. SOAD distilled the fear and paranoia of the dystopian 21st century in a huge way. I could write so much on this album because of all of the lyrics and the rebuke of corporate takeovers, commercialism, war, and drug culture, but I wanted to take this time to focus on one song in particular because it is simply one of the best pieces of heavy metal songwriting, and that is the final (before the no longer hidden track) song off of Toxicity, Aerials. 

The Avalanches Release Their 4th LP and AOTY, No Bad Memories, On Streaming But Not Floppy Disk

The Avalanches - No Bad Memories Review

 

The masters have returned. A decade after their surprise sophomore comeback album Wildflower, which came 16 years after their 2000 debut Since I Left You, and half a decade since their third beloved cosmic love and death and afterlife album We Will Always Love You, The Avalanches release their 4th intoxicating and hotly anticipated album No Bad Memories. And just like that, we have over a quarter century of 4 nearly (but actually) perfect albums by The Avalanches. Is it blasphemy to say that these guys might have the most Metacritic-backed god-tier album runs in music history, second only to The Beatles? Maybe it is, but when listening to all of their music that's come before and absorbing all of the words and sounds deep in your soul, it's really not that crazy to think. Yes, The Avalanches are actually the perfect electronic pop genre-hopping music artists around.  

My biggest update ever: AirdriftSignals Music Group 💬 & Focus - An AridriftSignals Visualizer 🫧

AirdriftSignals: An Online Music Magazine & Music Discussion Group

I guess it's time to finally reveal the launch of my second major website upgrade in just 10 months, that which also happens to be my biggest update ever for AirdriftSignals. I give you, AirdriftSignals Music Group.

This system I created was a major undertaking over the past number of months, but it was all worth it. I took the best of what's offered by all of the social media platforms and message boards and compiled it all into a supercharged discussion board for music lovers. Let's get into it.

Masterpiece Crate ∞: TOOL - Lateralus 25th Anniversary

TOOL - Lateralus 25th Anniversary Analysis and Review

I'm a few months late, but I have a good excuse, promise. You'll find out in very soon! Let's discuss this album now. Maybe it was destined to be, but TOOL became one of my favorite bands growing up and remain to this day one of my all-time favorite artists. Their music actually called out to me unlike any other music some 20-something years ago. Allow me to explain. 

Upon hearing their title track’s soft, opening guitar melody for the first time in my early teenage years, a meditative, almost religious-like refrain, at an undetermined time and place, the knowledge of who it was was lost to me, because as soon as it had come, it was gone, and I didn’t have the clarity to find out who I had heard. But the melody of Lateralus continued to whisper to me in many quiet moments for several years after, without me knowing who or what was replaying in my head. It felt like a lullaby or a comforting mantra that gave me this sense of peace that cut through all of the noise and the pain and the inner struggles I had growing up. 

It wasn’t until several years later on a fateful day a short time after moving with my family to Connecticut that I heard the sound again, playing on a neighbors computer. “What is that song?!”, I could hear myself thinking. My eyes fixed upon the computer screen and on the dark, ambiguous album cover (the original one before streaming) and the title underneath it: Tool - Lateralus. At that moment, I had one of my great musical awakenings.

New Archive Release, DJ Dark Flow - Allone (Experiments)

 

Hi guys. This is just a previously archived pair of tracks that I made but never released. They didn’t fit any projects I was doing at the time because they were more experimental, no pun intended, and a little avant-garde. Today I decided to release them as Allone (Experiments). 

Stoner Rock and Metal band Sleep, release their first new album since 2018, Hemispheres, with a new lineup and new sounds

Sleep - Hemispheres Review

 

This was one that I've been waiting for, from my favorite stoner rock and drone metal band, Sleep! Having enjoyed my fair share of Dopesmoker, and really going hard on The Sciences (more on that in a future article), Sleep are one of the coolest and curiously chill metal acts out there. How can metal be chill? Well, there's something to be said for their overarching theme of herbal sonic pleasures and deep low-end frequencies, which birthed an entire genre that Sleep almost single-handedly created. 

AirdriftSignals Recommends: 4 Electronic Albums You Should Listen To

 4 Vastly Different Electronic Albums You Should Listen To

 

Greetings, humans! If you haven't noticed by now, it's been a few months since my last article, which was for Nine Inch Noize's self-titled collab album. I have a tendency to post on this website in short creative bursts with a tightly sequenced lineup of current album reviews and classic album deep dives when the inspiration comes. I strike when the iron's hot and I give everything I can when I publish music articles. In the long gaps that follow though, I am regularly taken away on creative detours or for my own professional development. At the present time, I'm working on my biggest update ever for AirdriftSignals, which I will unveil in October...

As time passes by, there are albums that have been out for quite some time that I've wanted to recommend, or recent albums released within the past few years that I have missed for one reason or another. I like listening to them and I wanted to find a meaningful way to present them and share them and the reasons why I believe they stand out amongst the ocean of music that's available nowadays.

AirdriftSignals Recommends is something that I've been meaning to start for a while now. It is my way of grouping random music releases together and sharing my thoughts and ideas and why they are worth your time and energy.  

After finishing up the final leg of their Peel It Back Tour, industrial rock superstars, Nine Inch Nails, and their prolific opening act, electronic DJ Boys Noize, surprise fans with their remix collab album, Nine Inch Noize

Nine Inch Noize Review

If there ever was a time to be a Nine Inch Nails fan, now would be the time! Given how many years it’s been since a complete fully realized NIN LP, 2013’s Hesitation Marks, fans have plenty to be excited about. Yes, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have been at it with their Trilogy EP releases Not The Actual Events (2016), Add Violence (2017), and its final LP Bad Witch (2018), their ambient nightmare-scapes Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts (both 2020, same release), the seemingly endless film scores they’ve composed, and most recently their NIN-branded Tron: Ares soundtrack. 

The reason I say it’s their first fully realized NIN project since 2013 is because all these previous releases, while all amazing in their own ways, have been projects that have felt adjacent to what a proper NIN release should look and sound like in the late 2010s or 2020s. These projects are worth their weight in gold, but they all feel like creative detours and not a true NIN experience from beginning, middle, and end. The closest we can get to this full realization though, is a collab album with Boys Noize, which as it turns out is a reimagining, or remix album, of past big Nine Inch Nails songs. If you’ve been a fan, you already know that a remix album is actually legit for NIN, and this one frames the brooding industrial rock gods through an electronic, hybrid-EDM lens, and puts classic Nine Inch Nails songs to the test.    

Masterpiece Crate 7: Daft Punk - Discovery 25th Anniversary

Daft Punk - Discovery 25th Anniversary Analysis and Review

Kicking off the next deep dive article in my Masterpiece Crate series is an electronic album that is beloved to me. It had to be my very first electronic CD, which I asked my dad to get me. It's artwork (look at it!) and sound were incredible and mesmerizing to me and they dared to be the epitome of what our world would be transitioning into for the 21st century, but all the way back in 2001, which is shocking that it seems so long ago! Its synth-laden computer gloss shined outward and into mine and generations of young millennials' minds in a way that no other music had done before. It was a gift to grace our ears then and is still treasured to this day, a bonafide masterpiece of electronic robot rock, Discovery by Daft Punk.

For more on my Masterpiece Crate series doing album deep dives you can go here.