Kilbourne & Relaxer/Cry: AD 140 – Album Review & Interview

Kilbourne & Relaxer/Cry: AD 140

(Self-released)

Out Now | DL

AD 140 is the new album from Cry – a live duo collaboration between Kilbourne and Relaxer. This is a vortex where the idiosyncratic histories of each artist hijack the interstice between hardcore, techno and noise music. This is the kind of self-immolating debut release any artist would surely turn to as a sign of creative endurance and unyielding rites of commitment to the underground. Interview and Review by Ryan-Lewis Walker.

The word is band. Bands bleed. Bands burn. Bands bathe in bile together. Bands build communities. Band members end up in hospital beds. Band members end up dead. Band members end up having babies.

Cry is a new band. A duo of Kilbourne and Relaxer (who both have extensive roots in techno and punk culture). The band has a new self-released album out called AD 140. And however general this claim might be – there’s maybe a misconception that collaborations, whoever they might be composed of, start and end as studio projects, or experiments of indulgence in capsules of mediated serendipity, captured in the frenzied tingle of the moment as long as the tapes trickled another inch of spool, or the cameras were clever enough to be kept running.

In the case of Cry – the band mentality was, and is always intact throughout the five remarkable tracks on AD 140. A visceral, organ-arranging workout that reconfigures a hardcore gig with a soundsystem concept in mind (and visa versa) but still crackles with perambulating sense of spellbinding space to counterbalance such routinely brute force (itself a regularly wielded weapon of wrath from the respectful arsenals of either Kilbourne or Relaxer) – these tracks, this album, this band – bridges histories, while birthing new ones – with everything from the gut to the gums poured onto the floor for all to see.
”We’re both punks and we both make heavy electronic music,” says Daniel Martin-McCormick (Relaxer) on how the band came to be. ”And we get along. The idea for a band like this had been kicking around my brain for a while, but now that we’re here I can’t imagine doing this style with anyone else.”
AA”I remember we were gonna have dinner and talk about it at my house and I was very, very late. Embarrassingly late,” adds Ashe Kilbourne. ”I’m glad Daniel was still down after that.”

As individual artists, there’s a lot of ground to go over. In Kilbourne’s case, there’s a series of outstandingly prolific releases that specialise in showcasing the intricacies and extremities of hardcore techno in America, in all it’s unfurling psychedelic-scented properties and brutal, teeth-twisting nature. There is no ambience. No air. Just the feeling of being fist-fucked by a Freight train between the semen-stained walls of a cyberpunk’s wet room. Everything fights in the frontal lobe. With albums on her own Hammerhead label (the excellent If Not To Give A Fantasy, Panoptican, and The Clear Blue Sky by Buzzi), as well as PRSPCT, Industrial Strength and Evar Records (in that order, check out Cathedrals, NJ Terror and Seismic) and a personal favourite: Bloodrave: Music From Blade – a rescore of 1998’s vampire classic – there’s a palpable sense of seeing, for the fuck of it, what happens when the boat is pushed out far enough. Does it sink? Does it stay afloat? Does it get dragged down to the depths and devoured by sharks?

These are the questions one must ask. No less a sado-sonic visionary assailant of sensory-bombast such as Kilbourne. No less in New York- a zone where the scent of incoming dusk, silhouetting shoots and silos against skyscrapers and puzzle-platform construction sites, introduces further thrills to the chase that adrenalises margins to merge into centres as the city capitulates to the siege.

Martin McCormick meanwhile has gone under a variety of aliases over the years. There’s a near-limitless string of related monikers, bands and projects that McCormick has been involved with. A series of releases as Ital on Planet Mu (as well as Concealer, as Relaxer – which made its live debut at Berlin’s Berghain), but also a member of Discord-signed post-punk noise-exploiters Black Eyes, and co-founder of the Dripping camping festival and event series located in New York, Martin-McCormick’s work is the result of putting hardware through it’s punishing paces, and refining the multiform capabilities of that medium in live, and studio structures. From a series of self-titled releases (I-V), and featured on labels such as Avenue 66 and Climate of Fear (see: Coconut Grove and Hedonic Fringe) – a typical Relaxer piece will take you down through tunnels of bowel-burrowing bass, wormholes of warped synths, whirlpools of hyperactive rhythmic bite and fierce raves of frenetic head-wreckages glowing with growls of sound stretched to splinters.

Recently, and specifically on releases such as Licking and Candy (both 2022 on his own lovers Rock imprint, with the former featuring a killer remix by Kilbourne herself: all armour-plated EBM attack and concussion-inducing percussive rampage) and Break (2024) – Relaxer releases have seen McCormick experiment with sweltering, drum’n’bass-techno mutant grooves – all pulsating drones and difficult-to-pin geometries of rhythm that bludgeons in the BPM into new extremes. Break in particular (check the sticky Slurp, the dark techno-grunt of Piink Chew or the dizzying amphetamine-anime trip of Burning Spear) was a live set commissioned by New York-based d’n’b cult Headznite, and released on 29 Speedway.

Duration and sound design have also featured in his work following composition studies with Morton Subotnick of Silver Apples of the Moon and The Wild Bull fame. The philosophy behind this work can best be heard on Force Field: A Guide for the Perplexed and it’s successor, In Softening Air.
AA”I came up in the DC punk scene,’’ McCormick explains, ”which at that time put a lot of weight on authenticity, anti-corporate structures, direct community involvement and wide-ranging ideas. I learned a lot about music, about listening across genres, and about the raw practicalities of organizing yourself, your band, shows. Also, there wasn’t much of a sense of “making it.” This ethos has remained with me in the decades since. And the artists whose work stayed with me at that time were the ones who could also bring something impactful and personal to the table.”

An altar of impact, constructed out of a desire to develop and proceed onto the next thing, rather than stagnate in the pyramid-shaped pantheons of success – this is what defines Cry – an exchange of independently-geared artistic sensibilities and backgrounds (punk/electronics/experimental club sounds on a plethora of labels and parties) satisfied in the art of tearing up the rulebooks of their own trademarks while retaining what makes them artists both cult-status icons in their unique field, continuously striving to add more strings to the bow to the point the bow changes into something different virtually every time it is fired into a particular direction – wherever that might be, whoever that might be at.

Opening track, Like Fat Across the Meat, soon establishes the EP as a band-built madhouse of live performance refined into surgical-steel focus – dual vocals, goblins and gargoyles, grotesque messages and phlegm-inflected incantations corroded with pneumatic harshness are howled into the void, erotic and ravenous, on the threshold of bodily obliteration and cerebral defeat. A thick-fingered beat bounces and breeds 140bpm carnage throughout. Cables and veins crackle and explode in a transmission of dark, dirt-drilling techno from a demonic cage of noise.
AANext, Summer – an approximation of Consumer Electronics covering Venom, is a scalpel-snapping trick of fidgeting beats fighting for space in a space condemned and regularly drained of all space. Rapid discharges of blood spatter on a string of white t-shirts. Queasy pleas of synths whirl by, twin-pronged tongues soon gorge on the sight of a rave-laced lullaby give way to paths of beats, feedback and fragments of intergalactic sound, suddenly grabbed by the plights of earth’s smouldering, gravitational gabber-pull.

The idea of the live space turning into the studio is an interesting idea that dominates the precise sonic bonds of each track. Yet AD 140 isn’t a live album, or at least it doesn’t feel like it. It strikes in a very precise way, a testament to the veteran production sensibilities of each artist. Intuitive, yet under the thumb of scrutiny. Why was this the strategy Cry wanted to capture on the debut release? Whether or not this would have altered the take-no-prisoners feel of the album doesn’t matter. The fact is – the album draws it’s power from the tumultuous charge of a live experience, and the studio-savvy skills to dig deep into that idea is what makes AD 140 sound like it does.
AA”Cry is a band and we play live. Every band recording I’ve done has been recorded live, with minimal overdubs,” McCormick says. ”The point has been, and in this case must be, to capture the energy that comes from a real performance. Cry writes our songs live, on hardware, and we practice in the exact same way any other band practices. It would be weird and unfulfilling to unravel our parts and overdub them one by one, or re-construct them in the studio.”
AA”When we perform there are general patterns we follow,” Ashe adds, ”but we’re often improvising and reading one another for when we introduce a new element or move to a new section, so yeah tracking bit by bit would end up super disjointed. It’s freeing to do a project where the movement of the music is so intuitive.”

Moreover, the idea of Cry sticking themselves into the centre of a room embodies the concept of them as a unit operating at the eye of the storm. In the thick of the snake pit. In the arse of the reactor. Why opt for this position when it comes to stirring up a cyclone in a live space?
”We wanted to be with the audience and to be immersed in the sound,” states McCormick. ”We played our first show this way and there was no going back.”
AA”I want to feel as close to everyone else as we can,” Ashe explains. ”No stage, no booth. Also there’s so much gear, I reckon it’s fun for people to see it.”

Revealing the equipment for people to see shares similarities with punk in the sense it extinguishes the notion of the façade between audience and artist. Pedals are shells on the floor. They are not divine artefacts from another dimension. Setlists are soon-to-be-shredded scraps of paper on near those pedals. They are not ancient scriptures only to be handled when wearing a pair of white gloves. The live space heaves because of this dissolution of binary. The sheer effusion of sound is so powerful because of that dissolution.
AALeash unleashes a flurry of machine guns, loaded to the lungs with metallic blasts of of chattering rhythms, sub-woofer scalding bass drones and twilight-stimulated wildlife prowling around the remnants of some government-quarantined suburb. There’s half-time dissolves of junkyard drums, slices and glides, creaks and creases of dreamy atmospherics that are cracked wide open and leak through, a caustic command hisses out of the walls. Hands open to be received by the rush.
AALeach is quite the opposite. A brooding beast of minimal techno. Slow-dancing cars cruise by in lanes of interlocking traffic observed from an adjacent tower block. The low buzz of feedback whirrs like a weak fly behind cream blinds. Quick signals of sulphur sounds dart across the sky like a firework display in a silent film. Bleeps of boiling liquids explode with melodies as it’s all soon caught up by the ethereal groove of the drum – first just the firm root of the bass, then the hat, then the climax towards total bliss. It does darken towards the tail-end. The techno pulse occasionally knocked against by city debris looking for a home to land in. Things distort, rot, and fragment upon being fermented in light for this long. Balance struck. It could go on forever.

Finally, Sapling Youth sprays you in the face with a splurge of wheezing sirens and judders of drums. Kilbourne’s supernatural voice screaming from the centre of the pit. McCormick’s soot-stained barks polluting the variously deployed dynamic drills to chaotic impact. Melodies decompose as the juggernaut squelch of a dissenting bass flare finds it way to the foreground of the final moments. An eyelid-splitting drum spits against the damned orchestra at the end.

Space to breath and time to blink in some places – nothing except hard walls of interrogative slime in others; like stretches of rhythmic tar-traps and pools of sulphuric soundscapes; there is great amount of musical variety on the record. Influences abound sure, but it was mainly in the ambition to add flesh to the tracks and see to their completion that inspired AD 140 overall. All influence, and none at all – appears to be the answer.
AA”We each bring our own web of influences,” McCormick says. ”Heavy post-punk, noise, power violence, Birmingham techno, gabber, dub, etc etc. But once the ball is rolling and we’re writing, it’s all about the material at hand. In the band, my biggest influence is Ashe, in that we are trying to push each other and match each other’s energy.”

As producers with distinct identities, careers, legacies, reputations or whatever too, it’s interesting to hear what they each introduced into Cry that complemented/contradicted/mirrored and refracted each other to make it what it is. They each have a toolkit of tricks to deploy, but Cry presented them with an opportunity to negate those internal, creative instincts and do something new, safe in the knowledge that whatever scraps they each fed to the album’s vibe – it would be validated by the other in ways unexpected, and welcome.
AA”We make and play different music,’’ Ashe states, ”both as solo artists and members of other bands, but we share an interest in raw sound, trying to make something that is the truest version of itself. I remember at the start not wanting to do any gabber kickdrums cause I felt like that was all I did as a solo artist, but Daniel’s interest in pushing our sound and using all the techniques available to us opened me up to how fun using hardcore kicks in a new setting could be. Daniel always wants to add a hi-hat on the upbeat and I always want to take it out.”
AA”We have enough overlap that we can work together,” McCormick adds, ”and we have enough difference that we’re not seeing things from the same POV. I’ve always been fascinated, from a distance, by hardcore (both punk and electronic variants), and wanted to find my way in, even though I’m not of those worlds, exactly.”

Soundsystem as battlefield. The sharing of vocal duties is a symbol of physical recognition of Kilbourne and Relaxer’s roots. Roots that tether them together in a helix of punk-informed techno history. But an awareness also of how those roots can be ripped up from the earth like cables under vast landscapes of concrete. The vocal stylings themselves are very different – Kilbourne’s is a dizzying whiplash, a slashing sentences together like a sabre through a sheet of cotton – it’s sabre-sharp, cuts quick, and leaves an echo-trace lingering where the physical body once stood. McCormick’s is a acid-gargling blowtorch of a voice – like chunks of flesh jammed into the carcass of a still-kicking machine – it swells with tumescent energy and chin-chewing darkness. Blackened. Yet – everything sounds entirely cohesive, feral, and fucked up. You can visualise beads of sweat and droplets of blood. You can visualise the teeth – cracked and bared by the desire to externalise the demons sinking themselves into oblivion from the darkest hypogeum of deepest hell. Did they have any preconceived ideas about what would happen if they were to stand – comrades connected to the same cord, yet more than willing to wrangle from it’s grasp, face to face.

”Once we had the vocals locked in, we knew we had it,” McCormick says. ”I’ve always liked switching off vocals – it’s a big part of my band Black Eyes – and I always liked Ashe’s vocals in Trophy Hunt. We had been jamming more instrumentally for a while, but one day we took some material to a practice space where we could get really loud and each had a mic. It was the moment Cry really came into being.”
AA”We don’t sing on every track but it’s such a core part of the band,’’ Ashe adds. ”I’ve always loved duelling vocals in punk bands, it builds energy real quick. I like to sing scratchy and gurgly style, but I’ve also tried more clean singing in AD 140. I’ve done vocals in a few bands but until Cry I’ve never had the mixer right in front of me, so I’ve learned to love throwing the vocals to delay or reverb when you want some more juice. In past projects that would just be a studio flourish.”

Music of this standard of visceral and bodily combat continues to crop up in the work of Kilbourne and Relaxer as individual artists, and on Cry – as though there’s a decisive effort to build walls in order to wreak havoc on them shortly after. There’s a palpable surge of aggression in techno, in punk, in noise, as well as moments of texture, emptiness and space. There’s a variety of interpretations as to what ‘heavy’ or ‘hard’ or ‘physical’ music is. Music that unsettles. That destabilises and dislodges things from their place and sees how well they survive somewhere else – timeless tsunamis and avalanches of rhythmic feedback, throwing the body against effigies of barbed wire.

However – so too is there a counterpoint to the brutality, which is just as significant a feature on AD 140, and something both Kilbourne and Relaxer have been perfecting for a while.
AA”I love aggressive music,” Ashe states, ”but true brutality is nuanced and dynamic, there is a continuous build and release of pressure that makes the heavy moments hit hard and the soft moments give true relief.”
AA”Brutality in itself doesn’t mean much of anything,” says McCormick. ”But some heavy, or aggressive music just really connects and cuts through on a soul level. That’s what blew my mind with punk – the way it felt like it sliced through the screen of reality and revealed something alive and a little scary.”

Through the screen of reality – cover your mouth, but keep both eyes open.

~

Kilbourne | Bandcamp

Relaxer | Bandcamp

Photo | Guarionex Rodriguez Jr

Words | Ryan-Lewis Walker