Jupiter Nights: B L A C K O U T ft. Ye Gods & Desolation Colony

Desolation Colony was formed by Joshua Strachan (Vaura, Azar Swan, Blacklist) in the summer of 2019. Though most of his work remained based in New York, Strachan had been living for several years in New Orleans where he and fellow Wierd Records alumni Justin Vial spent many evenings in Bywater bars and/or in their home studios, each strewn with a different array of synthesizers. Following Azar Swan’s tour for Savage Exile, an album which the band described as having been co-written in the sense that half the songs were written almost entirely by frontwoman Zohra Atash and the other half almost entirely by Strachan, Joshua found himself continuing to write hard, dancefloor-oriented, noise-infused EBM songs similar to “Twilight Anesthesia” and “Jungle Law.” 

Azar Swan began taking a new musical direction and, after falling deep into the thrall of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, Strachan began to imagine a new incarnation of apocalyptic music, one that came naturally since New Orleans summers are a carnival of ecological disaster and climate collapse. Opting for a vocal style and atmosphere not far removed from Strachan’s black metal flirtations in Vaura, maintaining the power electronics textures of Savage Exile, while adding elements of minimal synth and EBM, Strachan has said the first Desolation Colony material sounded like “Skinny Puppy for Berghain.” Tapping Kindest Lines synthesist Justin Vial to round out the compositions with additional modular textures and beat variations, and Kris Lapke (Alberich, Prurient, Hiro Kone) to mix, Desolation Colony completed its first LP for Mannequin records in early 2020 just days before the COVID lockdowns ensued. 
“When you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you,” writes VanderMeer in Annihilation. More than just another bleak chronicle of disaster and human decline, Desolation Colony paints the destabilizing environment in panoramic vision, injecting it with the relentless pulse of a humanity that may yet survive.