Emerging from New York City’s subterranean trenches, Content Blocks explore the acoustical infrastructure of their environs through reflective soundscapes and post-club iterations. The duo, consisting of Ian Campbell and Matthew Hord, have collaborated and participated together for years in musical endeavors and events. Their near-decade of shared experiences crafting, programming, and operating the electronic instrumentation in heralded industrial act Pop. 1280 has informed this journey further into hardware experimentation – and this new partnership shows the results of their journeys into ambient abstractions, dancefloor deconstructions, and fractured pop tropes steeped into darker realms.
“IMDS,” their first release, explores their focus on melding off kilter percussive patterning into textural immersion and manages to find a balance between plaintive and uplifting. A fever dream of reverb is smeared across a dancefloor malaise, the disaffected vocals inhabiting a space not unlike the walk home after the afters – the avenue empty, the building surfaces emitting echoes of parties past. Conceived further in concept as an audiovisual experience, the single is accompanied with a video created by longtime collaborator Scott Kiernan (ESP TV), focusing on an accelerating centrifuge interspersed with frames of cell death and electronic feedback, all orbiting the centerpiece of a lone dancer. This track is the beginning of multiple collaborations between Content Blocks and Kiernan that can be expected in later months to come.
Content Blocks will be touring the East Coast Spring 2024 in support of their upcoming releases.