Molchat Doma presents historically-minded music listeners with an interesting question: how is it, exactly, that such bright, uplifting synth jams have ended up coming out of Belarus, of all places, a country previously ravaged in the 20th Century by both World War II as well as the Soviet satellite state occupation that came later? Perhaps Molchat Doma have simply learned to move past all of this, regarding it from a bit of a sarcastic, humorous perspective as a coping mechanism. Or perhaps, as the artwork on their newest 2020 album may suggest, they actually feel more of a cultural kinship with Mother Russia than some might suspect.

Whatever the case, this delightful trio who have done quite a bit for the synthwave/post-punk revamp in the past couple years are back in action again with Monument, which could easily be their most warmly caressing release yet.

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It’s not as if Molchat Doma weren’t any good prior to dropping Monument on the ever eager synth/electronic fans of the world. In particular, Etazhi (2018), with that weird hotel on the cover, received considerable acclaim, winning over many music journalists (myself included) and appearing on many year-end lists. But whereas Etazhi was a little more bass heavy with its production and overall bouncier on the songwriting front, Monument takes a backstep from this delivery, slowing tempos down a hair and focusing on the higher end of Molchat Doma’s trademark synths.

The result is noticeably more meditative, ringy, and a bit, well…. sexier.

In past interviews and in their biography, Molchat Doma claims to take a significant cue from Russian rock, but there’s far more than that mere aspect to unpack with Monument. Part of what I’ve loved so much about the so-called “synthwave revival” is how it feels distinctly old-school and new-school simultaneously. The Russian rock influence may certainly be there with Monument, but there are also clear touches of non-Russian stuff from the 1970s and 1980s.

The album also feels more multidimensional with some of its underlying influences and songwriting approach. Though an excellent release, Etazhi nevertheless felt slightly samey with its songwriting after a point. Monument broadens the Molchat Doma delivery quite nicely and covers more bases sound-wise. I have particularly been abusing the replay button for the fourth track “Ne Smeshno” which gives off something of an Eastern aesthetic with the guitar tone and also sees front man Egor Shkutko employing a charismatic yelling vocal delivery that I don’t exactly recall hearing with Etazhi.

Further, Pavel Kozlov’s bass offerings on Monument come off as a lot fatter and more audible than on Etazhi, serving to give the record a wider, more spacious final sound that works wonders on the listener.

Monument isn’t that different from its predecessor in Etazhi, but it is nonetheless doing enough things differently to serve as a commendable next step in Molchat Doma’s sonic evolution. In the realm of the “synthwave resurgence” that’s been booming since about 2015 or so, Molchat Doma have stood out firmly from the rest of the pack for multiple reasons, not merely for having a vocal dimension while many other artists remain purely instrumental, but also for simply feeling a lot more dynamic, layered, and all around fun than their competition.

Hail to the synthwave rebirth, especially to these wonderful composers from the land of sgushenka and of fine chocolates.

— Sahar Alzilu

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Monument released today, November 13th, 2020 via Sacred Bones Records.

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When most people think of rock music and subsequent offsprings like heavy metal, they often think of a guitarist (sometimes two), drummer, bassist, and finally a singer. However, a musician that often shows up just as often in rock’s history is the keyboardist, having evolved in equipment from electric piano/organ to meletron to analog and digital synthesizers.

Metal, for its part, has often blustered about with the attitude that such instruments detract from the genre’s focus on heaviness, but the truth is keyboard-based instruments have existed in metal since the beginning. Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Rush, and yes, even Black Sabbath — they all eventually used them. Iron Maiden famously proclaimed they’d never use keyboards to then only later eat their own words by the mid to late 1980s.

Since then, synthesizers have even found their way into extreme metal, whether in the otherworldly intros/outros of thrash and death metal bands or sometimes taking center stage on many a black metal song.

Concurrent to metal’s use of keyboard and synthesizer instruments has been progressive rock’s adoption along with its offshoot genre progressive electronic, defined by such groups as Tangerine Dream and Vangelis who reached a great deal of renown in the 1970s to early 1980s. A number of these groups even started composing film scores, which proved to be a method to simulate the sort of emotional atmospheres created by a symphony but with multi-tracked electronic waveforms that constituted a far smaller and financially appealing budget.

This, in turn, inspired synthesizer-heavy bands like Goblin and even filmmakers like John Carpenter to compose their own synth-based works to accompany horror, science fiction, and thriller movies. Thanks to metal’s love for movies like these, metalheads for decades have often had synth-heavy soundtracks amongst their record collections.

All of this — from metal’s reticent love for incorporating synth to the cinematic thrills soundtracked by non-metal synth composers — distills into Zombi. Together for nearly two decades now, Steve Moore and A.E. Pattera have been creating music that originally started as a tribute to the maestros of italian-horror-soundtrack synth-rockers Goblin. They even got their name, Zombi, from the italian title of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, which Goblin composed some of their most well-known work for.

The band’s metal and punk bonafides are blatant, whether it’s their long partnership with legendary extreme music label Relapse Records or touring with heavy-as-a-metric-ton bands like Isis and Daughters.

Over the past decade, Zombi haven’t kept the most constant presence. Their previous album Shape Shift was four years in the making while their latest, 2020, took a whole half-decade to see fruition. Live performances have also gone absent for a number of years at a time. The general absence is understandable once you reckon with how many projects Moore and Pattera are involved in, including solo projects, other bands, and even composing film scores — the latter being an opportunity to elevate their talents to audiences that might never otherwise discover Zombi while also indulging in the craft their musical heroes Goblin were so well known for.

I had the pleasure to chat on the phone with Moore where we discussed a range of matters including the difficulties of messaging as an instrumental band, how the pandemic has delayed planned changes, and comparing the band experience to the creation of film scores. Where we started off, though, is pondering on the nature of their new album’s title, as it’s certainly one that could be interpreted in many different ways.

So the title 2020 for the new album, under normal circumstances, that would seem to be a little bit unimaginative, but giving how the year’s turning out, I think this is gonna be quite a memorable album title. So how exactly did that title come about?

Well, I mean we have a sense of humor. I think that there’s definitely something a little bit funny about taking an iconic year like 2020 and naming your album title that, and it was sort of maybe a bit of a reference to 2112. We just thought when growing up the year 2020 seemed like it would really be the future. It turns out that it kind of is but it’s not really the future that anyone really wanted. So in a way it turned out to be a very dystopian and post-apocalyptic album title [laughs]. We had it all set before the Coronavirus hit, you know, and another reason for the title is we’ve been a band for about 20 years now. It just seemed like a way to sort of mark our time as a band.

Now that’s interesting that you had it already in mind beforehand. Also, I like the relating of it to 2112.

Yeah, we’re massive Rush fans.

Kind of related to the idea of themes and subject matter, since you guys are an instrumental band, do you ever feel exempted from letting your music make a comment about society or what’s going on in the world? Or do you generally feel glad that you avoid that?

That’s really interesting because in these insane times it does kind of feel a little bit weird to not be making a statement but as I mentioned, we’ve been writing this album over about the last three years or so. All of this stuff was put together before Coronavirus and the massive civil unrest in the United States had really started. Our whole thing is that we’ve always wanted to provide a bit of an escape for people. So in a way it wouldn’t really work for us to try to bring our politics into things.

We have tried to do that in other ways like in the promotion of the new record. We did a raffle, actually a few weeks ago now, for a test pressing of the new record and all the proceeds benefited Black Lives Matter and other appropriate outlets. I think we kind of feel bad because we do have a bit of a voice and we don’t use it for that so it’s good being able to say things like Black Lives Matter. It’s very important to do that when our music may not really dictate it because our music is more for just escaping reality. So yeah, there’s a bit of a divide there.

As you say there, at least with social media and I guess the marketing of the album you’re able to make some part of your voice heard.

We can make a contribution at least in the only way that we can. It was pretty great and a really rewarding experience.

It’s been five years since the release of Shape Shift, which, not by much, but I think it’s the longest gap you’ve had between studio albums.

Yeah, it probably is.

Was it just a consequence of the touring for the last album and then other projects coming up taking up time for both of you? Was there any other particular reason for the longer length?

I think a lot of it had to do with the touring based around the last album. When Shape Shift came out we did a few short tours here in the states to promote it but it was about maybe a year later that we got asked to support the Swedish pop metal band Ghost. We did a handful of shows, maybe about a week’s worth, in the states with them. Through meeting Tobias [Forge], the head of Ghost, it was very clear that he was legitimately a big Zombi fan and wanted us to do more shows with them. So we ended up doing a full European and U.K. tour opening for them the next year.

So it was just all of these really great opportunities for us and it really extended the album cycle for Shape Shift by an extra year and a half. It took us that long after all of these tours for us to sort of let the dust settle and figure out like, “Well, what do we want to say now?” We’ve been a band for like 20 years now so what’s the point of just putting out another album if it’s not somehow different and yet somehow an expansion of what we have always been?

That definitely makes a lot of sense, though also I have to say it’s really cool that Tobias is such a big fan that he brought you guys out.

I would say he likewise was probably an influence on the new record just in the sense that I really love his guitar playing. That along with some film work that I did last year required a lot of guitar playing. So I think all of that came together and I really wanted to add a lot more guitar to the new record because we never really work with that instrument at all.

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It’s funny how that naturally came up because my next question literally was going to be that obviously you had bass in previous albums, but I think this is the first time I really heard the electric guitar prominently featured in Zombi.

I played some guitar on our Spirit Animal album, which I think came out in like 2009 or 2010. So there’s some guitar on there but really, for this new record we already knew that we wanted to sort of expand our lineup in a live setting. There’s just really only so much the two of us can do. It began after, like I said, we really toured the shit out of Shape Shift. It really cemented the fact that we wanted to try to do something really different with the new record and that entailed that we envisioned having more members of the band playing live.

So a lot of this stuff when we were writing it, I sort of had a four-piece band in mind because that’s what we actually had a tour set for October here in the states. We had dates set and it would have been like a three or four week tour to support the album but of course all of that got unfortunately canceled. So I think it was sort of a natural progression that we both wanted to do something a little bit different and the guitar seemed like a really fun and easy way to differentiate this album from our previous work.

So hopefully when things change and live shows become a thing again you imagine the band would expand to something like a four piece for live shows?

Yes, we are absolutely planning on that. This is going to seem funny to some people but I will be playing bass and we’ll have a synthesizer player doing all the keyboard parts. Then we’re going to have a guitarist and Tony [A.E. Pattera, the other main half of Zombi] will be playing the drums right now. We have a booking agent working on a spring 2021 tour in Europe and it definitely seems like Europe’s probably going to open up before the states. Yeah, the states are just fucking everything up right now. I think there seems like a very real possibility that we may not be able to tour the states for a long time but we’re moving ahead trying to figure out how to get to Europe and it would definitely be as a four piece.

The press release mentioned a fair bit of rock influence mentioning Blue Öyster Cult and Rush. Would you say those groups are a new part of Zombi’s composition or have they always been there but just shine through more on this record?

I definitely think they shine through more on this record, but they’ve always been there. We definitely get pegged as the Goblin/John Carpenter sounding band, but I think if you listen to a lot of our stuff it draws just as heavily from places like Van Halen, especially the Van Halen tunes where Eddie plays synths. That was a major, major influence on me growing up. I wanted him to play keyboards all the time because I thought it sounded fucking rad. His guitar stuff is cool but I was always into when he played the synthesizers.

Also, I was always into Blue Öyster Cult as they were a pretty heavy rock band that had lots of synthesizers as well throughout their different phases. So yeah, I think that the rock influence has always been there in the band but we always grew up playing in rock bands. With Zombi, we wanted to do something different but I think at this point we just want to rock a little bit more now. We might be done with being obtuse and difficult and feeling more like, “let’s just be fun.”

Obviously you already mentioned you had it in mind before everything happened this year but do you think the events of this year kind make you feel like, “Fuck it! Let’s just do what we want because time is so short?”

[laughs] The funny thing is I was already at that point before any of this happened. I was totally ready to just be a full on active band again. That was the whole plan with this new record to try and kickstart that. To just be like an active band like we were in the mid 2000’s when we were touring a lot. We kind of really missed that. I’m at a point now where I have young kids but they’re in school now along with after school programs and stuff. So I’m a little more flexible to do more touring and we definitely have planned to really be a band again. Then this 2024 has just been like the most epic bummer.

Yeah. For a lot of people it is.

There’s just something about putting out an album and not being able to play any shows. It’s just a little anticlimactic.

How would you compare the reception you generally get from audiences to your music to say seven or 14 years ago? I’m asking that considering in the last few years synth heavy music has been so popular whether it’s the return of Goblin, John Carpenter whether in with studio albums or performing live, soundtracks to pop culture phenomenon like Stranger Things, or the popularity of synthwave in general.

You know, it’s hard to say looking back to when we started by signing to Relapse [Records] and first really found an audience. There was no scene for it at all, really for what we were doing but that was exhilarating to us as we really enjoyed being the odd band out. We sort of became this band that in a way could tour opening for almost anybody because we didn’t fit in anywhere. We ended up doing tours with bands like Isis, Trans Am, and a really wide variety of different types of rock groups. Usually we went over pretty well. It’s interesting now because there are so many synth based acts, like you mentioned, out there now that have really gained a fair amount of notoriety. If anything that probably pushed me to want to play more guitar on this record. Like I mentioned before, when we started out we kind of liked being a band that didn’t fit in and in a way I think we still don’t want to fit in [laughs]. It’s a bit like shooting ourselves in the foot really as we could just put out a fucking straight up synthwave record in order to try and ride that wave. We don’t because that’s just not in our hearts.

We’re just Gen-Xers and we just don’t want to be a part of the trends. I have no problems with any of it or any beef with the trends in any way but it definitely did push us to make a heavier record than we might have otherwise.

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Last question here. You’ve composed a number of film scores including quite a few between your last album and this latest for Zombi. For example, you did The Guest, Mayhem, VFW, and most recently Bliss. Besides Bliss, which I mean to see as soon as possible, I’ve watched the others and thoroughly enjoyed all of them.

Bliss is pretty cool.

Yeah, with it on Shudder now I definitely plan to check it out soon. In going back and listening to some of the scores you composed, they really do help create the mood of those movies. So what was it like transitioning from a band situation to a film composer?

It’s been interesting as I’ve always wanted to make music for films since I was like literally probably six years old. At a pretty young age I realized that a lot of the film composers that I was really into had actually been in bands when they were younger. That or they were bands like with Goblin. I was also infatuated as a child with Queen’s soundtrack to the 1981 Flash Gordon movie.

So I was just always into rock bands, film scores, and the combinations of them. As I grew older I got into people like Danny Elfman, who started out with Oingo Boingo, and it seemed like a lot of the film composers I was really into got their start by being in a band. So that was always the route that I wanted to take. I wanted to get into a band that would then get me into making film scores.

Zombi kind of did that because it enabled me to make solo records on my own. I put out a solo record called Light Echoes and that’s what director Adam Wingard heard and was like, “I want you to do The Guest.” So it worked out exactly that my involvement in music then got me into the film score work. Overall, it was really a pretty easy transition. I would say the biggest difference is that there’s no instant gratification at all but rather the most delayed gratification imaginable. The total opposite of playing a show. It’s literally months upon months of working and toiling just night and day on something relentlessly until it’s finished. Then it still might be five to six months before anyone actually sees it.

So I always try to attend the premieres of these films or film festival screenings of them because it’s the closest thing to playing a show with it. Being in the theater and seeing how an audience responds to the movie really is a really thrilling experience.

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2020 is now out via Relapse Records.

Support Invisible Oranges on Patreon and check out our merch.

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If you want a short version right away: VirtuaVerse, both the point-and-click adventure game and adjoining original soundtrack, are good. They are not only good, they are the current apex of synthwave as a genre, equal-footed sibling to the feature length film Blood Machines, which was penned by Carpenter Brut. Through these, synthwave as a genre fully extends into the two media formats that are most critical to it, with one exploring the profound influence of video games on the genre and aesthetic and the other exploring sci-fi and horror film.

One of the many appreciable elements of VirtuaVerse is how rich it is as an object, how many fruitful and satisfying disconnected strands of thought and influence come together in its creation. It was inevitable that we would receive a concept album that is a video game, rather than one inspired by games or inspirational for them. After all, we’ve gotten all kinds of other variations on the form, from stage productions from Dream Theater to graphic novels from Coheed and Cambria and more — even Blood Machines, equal in quality to this project and perhaps more approachable as a roughly hour-long film, is not unique in being a film-length project born from music.

VirtuaVerse seems to be the first concept album released as a video game as its original format, deserving not just a review of the game and music itself but also a deeper look at the relation of games and heavy metal (and how a project like this came to be in the first place).

The charms of VirtuaVerse start at its title screen. After the requisite short intro film and publisher logo splashes, VirtuaVerse greets you with a detail-rich depiction of a classic late 1980s or early 1990s computer desktop setup, complete with oversized and overweight CRT monitor, a horizontal tower complete with a floppy disc drive, and a veritable treasure trove of curling sticky notes, half-finished cans, and partially-posed plastic figures.

Each of these items is a clickable link, be it to the developer’s website, Master Boot Record‘s Bandcamp, the label’s site or more. This kind of detail-rich opening menu screen has been in vogue for some time now, showing up in places as varied as indie darling Surgeon Simulator and AAA mega-smash Call of Duty: Black Ops. It’s a form meant to indicate that even on that first meaningful click that the project to come is one that values small details and completeness of vision rather than just a streamlined central experience with minor set dressing.

That sense of richness of detail and fineness of filigree, with the above being just one example, is one that runs through the entirety of VirtuaVerse, both as a game and, more importantly, as a game-as-album.

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It’s fitting for the genreform of the game that this collaboration would so highly value keen detail work. Point-and-click adventure games are a genre not typically predicated on length but rather their depth, swapping out the sometimes endless cutscenes of JRPGs or continuous online play component of multiplayer-oriented fare with a keenness of writing and cleverness of puzzles.

VirtuaVerse doesn’t skimp in this department, clearly designed with thorough notes of the LucasArts classics like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and the Monkey Island series, and with a decent share of red herrings to boot. The one relatively major change for people used to this style of game are the various quality-of-life improvements all across VirtuaVerse. For one thing, it seemed on my playthrough that there were no out-and-out wrong answers to puzzles, nor successful combinations of items that yield no results. What this means effectively is that, for those among us untrained in the galaxy-brain mindset needed to approach most point-and-click adventure games, you can effectively brute-force the game.

This is less satisfying than cleverly ascertaining what needs to be done, of course, but it also means that the game can be completed comfortably in the ten-hour window rather than some of the harder games of this genre which can slog on for 20 or 30 hours not because they are long but because you are just plain stuck.

The logic behind the puzzles of VirtuaVerse is also substantially more forgiving. While characters do not often out-and-out state exactly what they want from you, nor do environments place a big blinking arrow over items of interest, the scenario writing is clear enough that a cursory scan of your inventory and the area will quickly map out who needs what and when. Compare this to the sometimes exceptionally abstract puzzles of the Monkey Island series, where in one passage you must put a ship’s anchor into a key lime pie and hurl it at a mime to get a prize.

I’m not saying there is no one on Earth who would think to combine an anchor with a pie, but I recall when I was younger spending a good two or three days stuck on that particular puzzle because, pitiful human mind-thinker that I was, I never would have thought to combine the two until my good friend who’d already completed the game clued me in on it.

This brevity — a $10 game that you are able to 100% in roughly seven hours — may feel scant, but VirtuaVerse prides itself on density over length. If we are honest, video games often pad out their length with meaningless collect-a-thons, aimless open-world map-filling and side quests that offer little save more ways to fiddle with the controls. VirtuaVerse, meanwhile, is as tight as the bulging muscles beneath a bodybuilder’s taut glistening skin, functioning more like a long interactive film due to the satisfying combination of its density and legible puzzle logic.

This sense of density also helps highlight the strengths of the writing and worldbuilding. The world of VirtuaVerse will be immediately recognizable to anyone who’s even so much as browsed the “cyberpunk” entry on Wikipedia, but while it may be tempting to knock off points for unoriginality, the game clearly communicates that it’s more interested in a concentrated aesthetic experience than in being groundbreaking.

It is fair, of course, to want new and exciting ideas, be it from games or music or film or any other artistic medium, but there is a value as well to well-crafted honing of existing ideas, especially if they are clearly communicated as aesthetic/genre experiences and not pretentiously preening as groundbreaking fare when they aren’t.

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VirtuaVerse Screens

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In this capacity, VirtuaVerse‘s bonkers plot, which over the course of the game tilts further and further toward hallucinatory cyber-shamanic Cronenbergian flair, certainly satisfies. The game is even wise enough not to linger too long on the sometimes boomerish or mildly problematic portrayals of things like sex work, indigenous people, shamanism, phone/internet addiction, or the like, making damn well sure to present the protagonist as too fucked up, destructive, and self-centered to be much more than just another perspective among many.

And it’s worth noting that the main character is a real piece of shit. There are multiple moments where your actions lead to the deaths of minor characters or the destruction of their livelihoods, all of which main character Nathan shrugs off with only a minor twinge of regret. The means justify the ends to him and, as ugly as the world is, it’s only ugliness that gets you through to the other side.

The game, meanwhile, has a slight narrative remove from these actions, using short cinematics to make you confront how truly fucked up and self-centered Nathan is being and how little he seems to regret any of it. The slight removal of agency caused by the genreform of point-and-click adventure games also helps cut the tendency for this type of writing in games to become tedious and moralizing like Undertale at its worst or, moreso, something as boorish and thin as The Last of Us, a game which simultaneously forces you to be violent while chiding you for it.

VirtuaVerse by dint of its form is not a game of you playing as Nathan but more you suggesting things to Nathan, such that when he acts selfishly against your own morals as a player, it feels more like reading the bad actions of a character in a novel or in a film. It doesn’t feel like the game is chastising you as much as remarking on this type of self-centered, self-elected “hero” figure who (minor spoilers ahead, sorry) winds up maybe just making everything worse rather than making anything better. The lensing is deliberately somewhat ambiguous; it’s a nasty, fucked up world Nathan lives in, with pushers and killers and abusive corporations and fascist cops and more.

But it also doesn’t cut him any slack for the things he does in response to that world. For instance, he continuously baselessly accuses his girlfriend of cheating on him, something she vehemently refuses and at times chews him out over. You can see where his thoughts come from, but not from a place of sympathy; he is endlessly insecure in a way that seems to drive his narcissistic destructive behavior and so, when you finally get to play as his girlfriend in a brief segment set (sit down for this one) in an underwater nuclear missile base largely battling a giant octopus, you begin to really sour on how shitty he is to her.

When Nathan’s actions lead to the permanent psychosis of a homeless man, it feels awful; when he destroys the pride-and-joy drone of someone he only acquired by getting them black-out drunk, you feel like a monster.

You destroy a band’s life in order to functionally steal their bus all after you arrange to have a man pledging to join a gang killed by gunfire all so you can rifle through his pockets for a badge. That things end poorly for Nathan in the end feels sour, almost too dark to be bittersweet. But it also chiefly feels deliberate. Cyberpunk within VirtuaVerse still at least holds some semblance of punk spirit, and so the long hard look at the vile things people give themselves license and excuse for feels like one of its chief thematic criticisms. Couple that with the hysterically surreal and bleak ending and it’s hard not to walk away satisfied.

It is during the final credit crawl that VirtuaVerse reveals one last trick. It is not, it turns out, a game made by Theta Division and scored by Master Boot Record. Or, rather, it is, but this presents things in the wrong relation.

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Up until that point, I was under the impression that this was to be an interesting formal experiment for Invisible Oranges, another step in our continued light experimentation to see just what a metal website can satisfactorily cover, what tendrils of heavy metal culture and influence (in either direction) we could grapple with satisfactorily.

I discovered that Vittorio D’Amore, also known as Master Boot Record, had not only developed the original concept and penned the story, he had also aided in the game design and dialogue writing of VirtuaVerse. He had done this, it turns out, because he is one of three members of Theta Division. In retrospect, this shouldn’t have been shocking; frankly, I had wanted a fresh and unhindered look at the game and its soundtrack and so, after taking the assignment, I deliberately dove in blind.

My notes, then, which constitute the review of the game at least, are based on that relatively blind experience, taking the game for what it was before me rather than having the better-shaped understanding of what I had just played that came from completing it and seeing that little bit in the credits roll by. The late-stage revelation to me that VirtuaVerse was not a game with a soundtrack by a chiptune/industrial metal artist but in fact a game-as-album felt like a rattling and satisfying sea-change in my perception of the project, something that nudged it from merely really good to highly recommended.

It makes sense, structurally, for someone related to synthwave to eventually produce a game. Hell, heavy metal and games in general go way, way back. Doom and Doom II, the legendary first-person shooters of the early 1990s, famously had a soundtrack at least partly composed of straight-up stolen heavy metal tunes rearranged for the buzztooth synth sound of Creative Labs Sound Blaster soundcards, with songs from groups as big as Metallica and Pantera getting that retro/bitcrushed treatment.

This event had three notable off-shoots:

First, and most obviously relevant for VirtuaVerse, it was that precise decision that generated the fundament for synthwave as we know it. There are other influences in the pot as well, obviously, from the leather jacket stiffened cool of Judas Priest to the broader world of chiptune and video game music (especially of the 16-bit era) to the classic cybernetic kosmische horror and sci-fi soundtracks of artists like John Carpenter, Vangelis, and Tangerine Dream. But without the iconic heavy metal soundtrack of Doom, of which its massively influential opening level’s piece “Hangar” is a barely-disguised version of Slayer’s “Behind a Crooked Cross,” it is highly unlike the specifically metal-inclined vein of synth music found in synthwave would ever have come to be.

Second, the success of Doom as a franchise plus the increasing notability of its stolen music pushed id Software to go for the real thing for its spiritual sequel Quake, where they famously commissioned Trent Reznor to record a full original soundtrack for the game. Reznor’s soundtrack, released between The Downward Spiral and The Fragile, was received with rapturous praise, living comfortably alongside the other albums of that early hot streak of his.

The third offshoot of Doom‘s stolen metal tunes built upon both of the previous fruits of that action when, in 2016, the rebooted Doom installment was announced to not only have an original heavy metal guitar soundtrack composed for it but one that was also to be procedurally interwoven into the fabric of the game itself. One of the trickiest components of soundtrack work, and something you have to be mindful of when either critically reviewing or even just casually listening to soundtrack material, is that it is made to live within the source context. Often, compositions for games or films will have deliberately curated senses of spaciousness and emptiness that should critically not be viewed as a gap or empty space within the song.

These spaces are meant to be filled with diegetic sound, be it the sound effects of a video game or the dialogue and scenery sounds of a film, offering a fullness in context that often cannot be fully created outside of that context. This is ultimately why certain punk, grind, and extreme metal bands began interpolating film samples and the like into their work, all an effort to replicate the implicit sensory overload of a well-arranged soundtrack/visual-ludo media interconnectivity.

This original procedural heavy metal guitar soundtrack for both Doom 2016 and its sequel Doom Eternal offer a direct connection in the interrelation of metal and games explored in VirtuaVerse, one where it suddenly feels wildly improper to view the game and the soundtrack as separate, one derivative of the other.

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It is tempting to compare VirtuaVerse to the other wing of relation of metal and video games, that of the game derived from the music and not the other way around. We have more examples of species in this space that you might immediately assume. Iron Maiden, for instance, have been hard at work in this arena, with entries such as the first-person shooter/greatest hits game/music collaboration Ed Hunter that celebrated the return of Bruce Dickinson to the band, the top-down Asteroids-like packaged with The Final Frontier‘s special edition, or the surprisingly competent gachapon smartphone RPG Legacy of the Beast.

Likewise, I wrote some time earlier about Amon Amarth’s platformer for smartphones, a game that attempted to justify a nearly ten dollar price tag with at least the premise that it was a fully-realized game.

These attempts at synthesizing games and heavy metal music live on the other side of the fence from the world of Doom however, not satisfactorily moving the ball forward on a synthetic and syncretic hybrid of the two but instead inverting the process, music being the groundwork for a new game rather than an equal partner in its object-form. Hell, even Double Fine Productions’ Brütal Legend, a thoroughly composed AAA real-time strategy title built off of the backs of dozens of heavy metal songs and figures, still ultimately felt (among other shortcomings) like a list of songs of interest to the developers rather than an equal-footed partnership of music and game.

VirtuaVerse the game is, critically, the album itself. The game acts as an efflorescence of the concept of the piece, taking the dramatic thrust of works by King Diamond, Dream Theater, Nocturnus, Queensryche, and more and taking it to the ultimate apex that something like synthwave demands. Where Doom, Quake, Hexen, and the eventual Doom remakes all sought to transform material from the worlds of death, dark ambient and thrash metal into subject for their hyper-violent odes to the ecstasies of those genre spaces, VirtuaVerse instead lives within a space that tends to be retrogazing, reconstructing a hauntological future rich in the past.

It becomes fitting when, textually, a great deal of VirtuaVerse the game becomes about recovering and utilizing old technology and hacking methods more likely to be found in The Anarchist’s Cookbook than a modern-day dark-web Tor-accessed site. It likewise makes conceptual sense as well that Master Boot Record and Theta Division would choose point-and-click adventures to be the platform for expanding their concept record into a full playable game. Where fellow synthwave artist Carpenter Brut expanded the lore of the video for “Turbo Killer” into the feature length film Blood Machines befitting the explicitly cinematic thrust of his approach to synthwave, Master Boot Record has always premised itself on computers and computer life, especially that of older technology.

VirtuaVerse is a good, solid addition to the genre it bases itself in, and the music packaged along with it not only does a damn fine job of evoking the cold, ruthless cybernetic cool of a grimy and amoral cyberpunk future, it also holds up well under the scrutiny of an isolated headphone listen. But perhaps more importantly, in a world where anyone can record a record at home and release their record to Bandcamp, VirtuaVerse as an overall project affirms the power of going that extra mile for a project.

This is not meant as a slight to those lo-fi and street-level offerings of others, and often even this type of extended production would be ill-fitting for certain groups or projects of that type. But it is hard to separate the intense satisfaction I feel viewing VirtuaVerse as the ultimate summation of Master Boot Record as an entity, strong enough that D’Amore could feasibly retire the project and rest easy knowing the mission was completed.

This sense of overall aesthetic completion is so incredibly rare and, frankly, many artists don’t tend to even try. VirtuaVerse deserves more than for someone on a website to sit back, say it’s pretty good and call it a day. This is a special project, deserving of thought and rigor and the same type of love that separated-at-birth sibling project feature-length film Blood Machines seems to be receiving.

Hats off to you, Master Boot Record and Theta Division. You did a damn good job.

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Listen to the VirtuaVerse soundtrack by Master Boot Record on Bandcamp; it was released May 12th via Blood Music. The game is available on Steam.

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I’m certainly not one who holds the view genre classifications are useless or some prohibitor of musical creativity. On the contrary, I think they help provide a map of the sonic territory we all wander upon, which not only helps define the well known but establishes the frontier that hasn’t yet been explored. All of which I’m stating upfront, because I feel it’s important to note the near decade long love affair metalheads have been holding with synthwave has in truth been more about said genre’s offshoot, darksynth. Others have made a strong case for it being a distinct enough genre where a sizeable amount of groups have gradually stepped away from the fun 1980s retro Miami Vice vibes and french electro house influences exhibited in synthwave founding acts like Kavinsky toward the darker electronic terrains of horror movie maestro composers John Carpenter and Goblin. Yet few in this genre of “darksynth” have rested upon their laurels but instead continually evolve with influences from musical scenes as desperate as industrial, ebm, metal and post-punk. One such individual that helped define the darkness of dark-synth while still refusing to ever hold still is Texas’s own James Lollar, who is synonymous to his project GosT.

Lollar, who previously played in numerous metal bands, started GosT (pronounced like “ghost”) in the early-to-mid 2010s where the horror aspects of his dark-synth work shined boldly with thick satanic atmosphere, both musically and aesthetically, which enamored his work to a great deal of metalheads. I personally got to witness GosT live for the first time in early 2017 when he opened for other darksynth titan Perturbator, and neither disappointed in making many a metalhead in the crowd, myself and quite a few close friends included, dance and jump about in a way so very unexpected for us. The experience proved to not alone be a diverse Los Angeles scene fluke, but instead I saw further electronic body movement play out at the hands of GosT later that year at both Psycho Las Vegas and a quite sizeable crowd at Maryland Deathfest.

In the time since then, two albums have been released that added further elements to GosT’s music, leading them toward a truly unique musical path clearly diverged from their dark-synth contemporaries. The latest of those two albums is last year’s Valediction which I found to be such a constant earworm inducer I had to include it in my honorable mentions of 2019. From programmed blast beats to screamed and clean sung vocals, the music found within certainly drives closer to extreme metal than it ever has been before. Simultaneously, it’s capable of morphing into gothic beauty at the drop of a beat or vocal change. “Relentless Passing” scorches out the door like Anaal Nathrakh, given only a small pause before leading into “Wrapped in Wax” with its warm synth bass lines that bathe the listener, accompanied by a goth croon intermixed with Dani Filth-esque shrieks that fits perfectly rather than interrupting the rhythmic flow.

The album continues constantly pulling between these poles of harsh extremity and dark comfort with Lollar at the forefront now with his versatile vocals, capable of emotional performances, particularly on tracks like “Bloody Roses” and “She Lives in Red Light – Devine.”

Lollar hasn’t only made changes in the studio, but has revamped the band on the stage. His former calling card — a skull mask — has been replaced with ghoulish face paint which transfixes fans as he asserts himself as a vocalist. Along with this, his electronic setup is a far smaller construction, opening him up to grab the mic stand to not only get up close to the audience, but also interact with a live bassist. Further he’s refined his live visual aesthetic with the inclusion of a rear projection video screen casting ominous and forlorn images. A very different dynamic to anyone like myself who hadn’t seen GosT in a little under three years but a change that’s certainly paid off in creating an even more memorable and rewarding experience.

Before I got to witness the reborn GosT on stage at The Echo in Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to interview Lollar in person after an earlier attempt over the phone was scrapped due to the band experiencing treacherous conditions on the road. We covered a number of topics ranging from the continued evolution of GosT, his time recently opening for some black metal legends in Europe, and what horror movies excite him today almost as much as the classics.

— Joseph Aprill

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It’s been a few dates into the tour, so how has it gone so far?

It’s been really good so far. The response has been good with people wanting to buy merch. We’ve actually been hanging at the merch table more than we usually do. So for sure people seem to be excited to see us.

Any cities you’ve hit so far or got coming soon that you’re particularly looking forward to playing?

Definitely looking forward to Baltimore, Richmond… and definitely tonight should be a good one as well. We’re also playing Providence, which is weird but whatever, and Cleveland. So yeah, pretty excited for all of those.

Providence, wow. Never been myself but if I ever do I’d want to stop at like H.P. Lovecraft’s grave [laughs]. This isn’t your first time headlining your own tour but you have played quite a few opening slots on tours, so how does it compare your headlining shows to your opening spots?

I like them both for different reasons. Support shows are fun because it’s someone else’s crowd so every night is a challenge to win those people over. Then it’s the opposite when headlining as the people who come are really into what we do. It’s been a while since we headlined, so this has been fucking awesome and feels like a breath of fresh air even if this is now only the fourth show so far [laughs]. All we did last year was support runs, so it’s good to have a little more space.

Speaking of touring, back in the fall you opened for Mayhem and Gaahl’s Wyrd. How did it feel being on the road and opening for some of the most legendary figures in black metal?

It was pretty cool, actually. The dudes in Gaahl’s band were really inviting and warm to us. They invited me to sing with them on “Carving the Voices” a few times which is pretty wild. I was super nervous [laughs]. Attila of Mayhem was really awesome to us. He just recently went vegan and we’re vegan so we were all bro-ing down on vegan shit the whole time. But yeah, it was surreal. Every night I went on stage with Kristian [actual first name of Gaahl] was nerve-wracking as fuck. He takes his shit really seriously so you don’t want to mess up his art.

I met him before in Bergen, twice actually. He can be pretty intimidating as I remember the first occasion but he was extremely welcoming and hospitable at his art gallery in Bergen more recently.

Yeah, honestly I think he’s just a bit shy really. He’s reserved and certainly comes across that way.

Playing at those gigs how did you think the pretty black metal audiences received you?

We for sure won some people over. We did have hecklers here and there, though. I’d never spit loogies on people in my whole life until that tour. For the most part though, people were pretty receptive. We definitely had people approach us positively at most of the shows who had never heard of us before.

Possessor seemed to be a pretty big change for the direction of GosT with the inclusion of your clean singing, black metal screams, blast beats and even synthpop-type influences. Valediction seemed to take all of that and crank it all to a higher intensity. Was that a natural progression or something you consciously went into when composing the album?

It felt pretty natural. I find it’s increasingly harder to express myself just with synths, so for example adding vocals creates a new layer musically as well as a new catharsis to the whole thing. It feels natural, but it was definitely a conscious choice to move away from just doing synths.

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One thing that’s been something I’ve noted throughout most of your discography was your use of sampling, often from movies. A few I haven’t quite recognized the sources, but there was certainly ”Christine” and “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” used along with on Possessora lot of samples of news reporting from the Satanic Panic of the 1980’s. As far as I can tell there’s no sampling used on Valediction, so what brought about that change when it seemed to be a feature of your sound?

Century Media is owned by Sony [laughs]. I mean seriously it’s that. Anything has to be cleared and it’s a bit ridiculous. Like they turned down a couple shirt designs we had as well. So yeah, that’s the main reason. I mean, it’s cool to use them, but they can also be a crutch instead of writing a proper bridge or something. Either way, early on with Century Media we knew we’d have to change. Earlier when we re-released the Skull ep with them it had “She Lives in Red Light” on it and there was a sample from The Craft. They were like, “That’s not going to work.”

Even without samples present on Valediction,the influence from horror soundtracks and the work of John Carpenter and others are still apparent on your music. What’s some of your earliest or strongest memories of horror movies and the haunting music often found on them?

The first horror movie I remember seeing was the first “Nightmare on Elm Street”. I was like 5 years old then, so it freaked me the fuck out. The soundtrack for it was pretty decent as well, a simple synthesizer soundtrack and for the same reason I like the “Halloween” soundtrack. I think I read somewhere John Carpenter wrote that on his synthesizer out of necessity because he couldn’t afford to hire someone to do the score. So obviously for me those two… well, and “The Exorcist” was incredible too.

Are there any modern movies that impress you in striking the same moods or atmospheres of your favorites?

I like that guy Ari Aster who did “Midsommar” and “Hereditary.” I thought they were both just classy as fuck with such a slow burn but the pay off in both of them was great. Like in “Hereditary,” the last ten minutes of that movie I was like, “Yep! This is everything I need to happen in a movie! It’s a perfect fucking possession movie!” [laughs] So those and the opening strings in Insidious, I didn’t necessarily like the whole movie, but just that giant orchestral moment of the score sounded like a hundred violins scratching. So yeah, that was pretty gnarly. I also thought the remake of “Evil Dead” was pretty good. I was stoked with that one the whole way through.

Nice, yeah I was surprised at how much I enjoyed that one. I loved the ending where it turned into something like “Raining Blood” and I thought, “oh why didn’t they put Slayer in the soundtrack here!?” [laughs] But yeah, I’m usually critical of horror movie remakes but that was a good one.

Same. I don’t like most of them and I can’t think right now of another one, but that one was pretty decent.

I might be repeating myself a bit here but at Invisible Oranges I’ve got a column about cinema and the world of metal, like such and such movie is really “metal.” I’ve so far detailed “The Wickerman”, “Midsommar” and “Phantasm” for that so for sure a lot of horror movies. For yourself what do you think keeps that connection alive between horror movies, the scores of horror movies and metal music that continues to draw people often to all of them?

I don’t really know why people are drawn to it, but I totally understand why people who like one would like the other. Obviously both are dark… but I can’t even really tell you why I’m drawn to it. It’s just something about the sound of it and it just making me feel the way I want to feel. The same, I guess, with horror movies… though I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily fascinated with violence. It’s just cool, I mean that’s a bit lame, but it’s just cool [laughs].

Along with the continuing progression in the music moving away from copying the earlier sound, there have been other changes in GosT. Valediction was your first album not on Blood Music, but now with Century Media, what made you decide to go there for a label?

I had signed for three records with Blood Music, and when it was time to renew a contract I was getting offers from Century Media and a lot of different places. I gave him [Blood Music founder and owner simply known as “J”] the opportunity to outbid Century Media and he gave me a pass. Century Media was the most down with us, with them being like, “lets fucking do this!”

Have they been pretty supportive of you so far?

Dude, it’s almost been too easy so far. They don’t bother me at all when it comes to creativity or anything. I’ve been having full reign on that.

On stage GosT is no longer just yourself as you have a bassist performing on stage with you. What’s his name either stagewise or real life?

His name is Carreau stage wise, but his real name is Chris. We’ve been friends for probably 30 years, so a long time.

What brought about that change in now sharing the stage with someone else?

It’s just an easy direct way to add something more entertaining to the stage. I also got tired of being stared at, because it was only me on stage, so that’s all that anyone is looking at which left no room for relaxation while on stage for me. Besides adding to the live show he was already helping me with tech work so it just made sense.

For a while and certainly the last time I saw you perform your appearance was always a skull mask under a hoodie and jacket. Now, though, you seem to be donning make-up not too unlike black metal corpse paint. I’m going to guess part of this change was the practicality of being able to do vocals on stage?

Definitely that. We tried to fuck with a few latex variants on the new look but it just sounded like I was singing under a mask with that muffled type sound. I think you can even hear that a bit with Tobias from Ghost when they play live. I’m just so hard on myself with shit like that so I was like, “fuck it, I’ll take the mask off.”

Are there any further live visual elements you plan to expand upon or have hopes to develop in the near future?

I’d like to travel with even more of a full band. It takes a lot of the strain off paying for lights and production for a live show. Any metal band can get on any stage and just go. With electronic music you need some stage production. So yeah, first and foremost I want to add even more people on stage, though I don’t know if it’s going to happen anytime soon.

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Valediction is out now via Century Media Records. GosT is currently on a headlining tour of Europe with support from Svart Crown. Bonus: check out our full review of Possessor.

Below are the remaining tour dates:

February 29 – Wroclaw, Poland – Pralnia
March 2 – Leipzig, Germany – Naumann’s / Felsenkeller
March 3 – Munich, Germany – Backstage
March 5 – Copenhagen, Denmark – Beta
March 6 – Hamburg, Germany – Logo
March 7 – Strasbourg, France – La Laiterie
March 8 – Eindhoven, Netherlands – Stroomhuis
March 10 – Nancy, France – L’Autre Canal
March 11 – Paris, France – Petit Bain
March 12 – Nantes, France – Le Ferrailleur
March 14 – Liège, Belgium – Reflektor
March 15 – London, United Kingdom – Underworld

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