BlackBlackGold

Our third New Blood winner is BlackBlackGold, otherwise known as Daniel Dodecahedron or Daniel Jones. Daniel is a New Yorker who lives in Berlin and is involved with music in many different ways: he is the editor of one notable magazine, a DJ, an event organizer and promoter with UnReaL, a musician creating under PALE MALE, a writer, and more besides. His musical tastes range wide and include genres as diverse as harsh noise and contemporary RnB. As a matter of fact, combinations of dark and heavy electronics with rap, pop, rnb music, and the recontextualization that comes from it is somewhat his forte. Daniel embraces the postmodern in music rather consciously and with glee – his selections are very rhizomatic and they are also very current. Yet there is nothing particularly ephemeral about the dirty places they take us.

This BlackBlackGold mix is something I imagine one might hear in Spider Jerusalem’s decadent City. It starts off on an ominous note with Rabit’s trap, black metal, industrial grinder Trapped in This Body, and moves into VIOLENCE’s unreleased gothic rasta track. The mix then goes off the dance floor through the grime and trap of 3 Teeth and The Bug’s aptly named “Dirty” (fuck that, murky!) into a nightmarish rhythmless Boyhazz track that takes us out into the open. Throbbing Gristle’s live rendition of “Discipline” and Bekele Berhanu drag us through noise into some crushing industrial beats from Shapednoise, until the mix evolves into Faisal Ahmed’s mystical ethnic track mixed with the sparse broken beats from Amnesia Scanner and J. G. Biberkopf’s “Black Soil”. That’s not even a third of what happens. The selection takes so many unexpected (yet seamless) turns – through screamo on ethnic drums, deep dubstep in empty city streets, cartoonish electronic black metal, 80’s synth pop made a year ago and so on – that it really seems like a sneak-peek into the bewildering amounts of information produced within the aether that inhabits us. The ending track hints at a fitting slogan for it all: Nero’s had a terrific day at Disneyland, and so should you.

In the records

BlackBlackGold on the mix

My mix encapsulates my current favorite vibe when playing out—combining noise, grime, hip-hop, goth and queer club sounds to create a future-industrial vibe—desires born from youthful viewings of Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Doom Generation. Old patent leather and shiny metallic beats. Black Metal Berghain, blown through a jet engine—yet always keeping sight of the idealism of pleasure in shared experience, no matter or nihilistic.

At night I am overwhelmed by visions of black-clad producers jacking off onto the cover of The Wire, illuminated by pyres that burn with the glow of laptop screens. Mental stimulation is fun, but body propulsion, the sticky succubal dance floors whispering “aphrodisiac”, that ceaseless Now—that is what matters. Transcendence through the propulsion of sound. In this sealed baking container of sweat and smoke, we breed and sate lust, tempt aggressions and arrogance to a greater goal—a better perception of spatial/spiritual connections through the necessity of flesh: skin the mediator of sensation, fetishism the product of the mind. In this corrupt plane, honest reactions are rare and must be wrenched from the human body. It must build like bile in throat, choking you out until the Real comes out your mouth. We have built an Icon of Bass to be consumed rather than worshipped, digested and rebirthed. Not in fire as the Phoenix, that child of the Sun, but in smoke and shadow.

The dystopia we were promised is here—let’s party like it.