026 - Cryosauna - Grid Failure

 

 

 “I hope this album represents another side to Dreampunk. It doesn’t have to be just pretty bright lights and phaser soft-synths. It has the ability to be soul-crushingly dark as well.” - Cryosauna, June 2021

Dreampunk is dead, long live dreampunk.  The death of a genre is not something to be taken lightly.  If it is not able to expand beyond the bounds set at its inception then it will stagnate and ultimately become futile.  So when one of the most promising young artists to come out of the dreampunk scene changes styles drastically, I take notice.  

Grid Failure represents the antithesis of dreampunk as it stands.  Where there was once warmth there is now frigid cold.  Complex interlaced layers that lull the listener to sleep? No more!  A wall of sound that envelops the listener in its bliss? It has been discarded for a stripped down minimalist atmosphere, offering nothing but the barest of structures and the harshest of soundscapes.

This album came out of nowhere and hit me like a ten ton chunk of galvanized steel that has fallen off the rafters at the mechanoid factory.  The music is deliberately, agonizingly slow.  The only direct comparison that I can make is with the extreme metal genre funeral doom.  

There is rarely a moment on this entire album where the pace tracks above 60 bpm, but oftentimes it is half or even a quarter of that.  This is the core evolution to Cryo’s sound.  He has embraced this entirely new approach and developed an album that can only be described as brooding.  

By incorporating a glacial pace, Grid Failure assumes a stark visual imagery.  Decay, ruin, death, and darkness pour out of every crevice of this album’s pores.  In Cryo’s own words, “I came up with this scenario about your typical ‘dreampunk’ city being hit with a power outage. All those bright neon lights just all of a sudden being shut off. Replaced with the muted yellow or orange dim glow of emergency lights. A skeleton of what once was a thriving urban metropolis.”

A skeleton of what things once were, a fitting description of how the musical execution manifests on Grid Failure.  Take Black Ice for instance, the first track on the album.  The song greets us with nothing but an eerie silence for the first few moments.  It slowly introduces random mechanical sounds before finally bludgeoning the listener with the kick drum.  

I can’t say enough how massive the snare and kick drums are on this album.  While each track is slightly different in execution, the end result is the same.  They carry a weight to them that is highly uncommon in the electronic world.  They strike so infrequently compared to most other genres that they almost require the mass that they have when they are present.  

“Given that the album’s songs are all incredibly slow-paced, the real challenge was making loops that would not get boring. 20-40 bpm. It was very difficult trying to make a song that doesn’t become a drag at a tempo that slow. Definitely shook up my songwriting skills.”

Black Ice continues its evolution by adding more and more layers and eventually manifesting in this colossus of sound that is devoid of melody or humanity.  Upon its conclusion the blueprint for the album has been laid and the dreampunk albums that preceded this in Cryo’s discography have been cast aside.  We are left only with the birth of a new machine.

Pale Skin, Near Zero Kelvin, and the title track all closely follow the groundwork  laid in Black Ice.  They all offer their own variations on its sound as it is the soul of this album.  There are exceptions of course, and they all offer their own interesting and unique takes on this new vision that Cryosauna has given us.  

Bitter Winds and Frostbite offer just the briefest glimpse of Cryo’s previous trademark sound.  Bitter Winds in particular uses the ethereal male voice that dominated previous releases such as Restless - but just at twenty five percent that album’s speed.  

Enveloping Dark offers by far the most experimental track on the album, which considering the nature of Grid Failure is quite the statement.  The song contains strange inhuman chants, distorted Tibettan singing bowls, and some of the most disjointed song structures on the album.  The sound on Enveloping Dark is not uniquely Cryo’s with  artist  LKF given additional writing credits for the track.  “They sent me an email with a bunch of stems of weird buddhist sounding music. They wanted me to make a song out of those stems. Their sound, atmosphere and mood perfectly fit the project I was making.”

This leaves the strongest track of the album: Overcoat Blue.  This song, this insane song, takes all of the elements of Black Ice, Pale Skin, etc. and takes them up to a whole new level.  This is the seventh song in the album and it offers the first and only true “wall of sound” approach on the entire album.  

Unlike a typical dreampunk warmth and depth, Overcoat Blue takes the oppressive and brooding atmosphere of the album, adds a touch of minimalist melody and then obliterates the listener with its sheer magnitude.  Where  massive kick and snare drums dominate the other tracks, the percussion on this song has the weight to break continents in twine.  It's so all encompassing that I often have to pause the album and gather myself after this song completes.

Grid Failure represents a powerful new statement for Cryosauna and dreampunk as a whole.  Cryo has firmly established himself as one of the most exciting and important new artists within the genre.  This album represents not only the next evolution of his sound but a bold new step for dreampunk.  With Grid Failure  Cryosauna has elevated himself from an excellent artist into the realm of the elite.  

Equipment Used

“I used a lot of iZotope’s ‘Trash 2’ on this record. There’s this ‘convolution’ section in it, where you can make whatever signal you’ve fed through it, sound like it’s coming out of an amp, or a tinny speaker or whatever. It really helped pushed forward that dystopian, black, depressive sound.”

Acknowledgements
Thank you again to Cryo for taking the time to answer my questions about this album and talking about the evolution of his sound.  Thanks as always to my small army of proofreaders: VS, Kagami, Blashy, Kunisaki, Mark, David, and R Infinity.  Lastly but certainly not least thanks to Blissmonkey for editing this monstrosity and promoting the hell out of my works.