I'm always curious about the person behind a piece of music. What motivates them. Their likes and dislikes. Their greatest failures and grandest triumphs. It's impossible to know everything, even after a full conversation... and even though I do interviews, I rarely ever feel like I've scratched the surface of the ways that someone's art intersects with their life- even after we've been talking for an hour or more. Even though knowledge about a person can improve my appreciation of their art, I still like encountering some works entirely blind. It helps me refocus on my own perception of the work. A necessary recalibration, because ultimately, that's what is going to determine its impact- not who made it, but how it made me feel.
I know next to nothing about Renderer, and I get the sense that this may actually improve my experience of their music. It's industrial house music that feels as cold as a closed casket and as hospitable as the interior of a meat locker. It trades in a kind of frozen, prismatic atmosphere that freezes the sweat as it squeezes out of your pores leaving it to drop like diamonds spilled during an aborted heist. It's music that surrounds and scrapes at you like a pack of hungry dogs. It is music that seems to flow from the claws of some maligned apparition, One that is doomed to twist knobs and push shifters until it finds the frequency that will open the gates to the nether realm and deliver it from the pain that accompanies unlife spent amongst the living.
A narrow escape is what Virtual Presence delivers- an annihilating quest that will drag you through the eye of oblivion by seductively tutoring in the pleasures and ravages of sound. It's like an Italian disco where spinning stage lights burn with a cold fury like dry ice drawn across your skin- searing you with callous excess until your body gives up its ward and allows your spirit to run free through the dead of night. I know nothing beyond what I've experienced, and what I have experienced on Virtual Presence is a most exquisite form of death.
