Zachary Fairbrother is a long-standing and multi-talented member of Philadelphia’s DIY scene, both as a solo performer and as a member of groups like brash and bold digital hardcore duo GHÖSH. But with the Mechanical Death Wish Mixtape, his first release as COUNTACH, his craft kicks into a new gear. Fairbrother conducts a symphony of jagged breakbeats, plunderphonic samples, and high-energy hardware jams into an immersive experience that amps up your heart rate at the same time as it playfully engages your imagination. It’s the gripping soundtrack to a sci-fi movie that doesn’t exist, a synthesis of android dreams and alien nightmares.
The album’s opening track functions like a main title sequence, with pounding drums and a haunting John Carpenter-esque synthesizer line that transports you to another dimension. But just as you think you know where the movie is headed, COUNTACH swerves into another lane, as hypnagogic horror collides with a chopped-up ghettotech vocal sample on “It’s Time.” The COUNTACH sound is a cyborg itself, blending heavy live drums with distorted breakbeats: the synthesis of man and machine is most evident on a song like “Drug Auction,” caught up in a tug of war between a slower, full-bodied drum beat and up-tempo breaks, fused together by a distorted vocal stutter, before giving way to an almost ambient whirlpool of synthesizer bleeps.
You might hear the influence of turn-of-the-millennium electronic greats like The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers in the furious drum and bass, as well as echoes of leftfield hip-hop acts like Dan the Automator and Dr. Octagon in the scavenged samples and repurposed snippets of dialogue woven throughout the mixtape. But Mechanical Death Wish Mixtape isn’t trapped in the past either, riding the beat to wherever it takes you. Though it’s largely an instrumental affair, vocalists like Bret Kaiser and Julia Louise Knife Fist take turns spitting rap bars on hyperdrive, pushing the junglist big beats that form the backbone of Fairbrother’s production into full rave territory.
As song titles like “The Promise of Technology” and “Second Screen Experience” suggest, there’s an underlying thematic core to the project beyond just atmospherics: while Mechanical Death Wish Mixtape wouldn’t exist if not for the possibilities of electronic music, its relationship to technology is slightly tongue-in-cheek, with a sense of anxiety about the influence of artificial intelligence and automation creeping in at the margins. On the title track, a haunting voice from a mid-century radio drama speaks most directly to the very-reasonable paranoia many of us have about the devices that increasingly dictate our reality: “You think the big electronic god is going to save your lives? Well it’s not... A complex machine has a personality all its own. You know what that personality is like? It’s cold, withdrawn, uncaring, unfeeling.” Mechanical Death Wish Mixtape might be born from machines, but it’s anything but cold, with a lively sense of humor and unpredictable personality that thumbs its nose at whatever dystopic future might await us. In an increasingly automated world that feels all too rigid and conformist, COUNTACH injects technology with a much-needed dose of human warmth.
Credits
Released December 6, 2024
All tracks written, performed, produced, mixed and mastered by Zachary Devereux Fairbrother, except;
Drums recorded and performed by Christian Simmons on The Promise of Technology
The Gazillionaire Sprint co-produced and written with El Grillo. Vocals and lyrics Bret Kaser. Mixed and mastered by El Grillo
2 Door Rav 4 vocals and lyrics by Julia Louise KnifeFist
Composite Break co-produced and written with Kevin Keenan
Trench Bong Gang vocals and lyrics by Will McGowan
Artwork Gavin Caffery
