Egyptrixx’s World is Submerged and Saturated with Industrial Waste – AdHoc

Egyptrixx’s World is Submerged and Saturated with Industrial Waste

David Psutka has evolved his sound far past the dancefloor, onto another planet entirely.

As Egyptrixx, Toronto producer David Psutka trawls the depths of sonic possibility. His latest album, Pure, Beyond Reproach, is a stark work contrasting serene, natural cinematics with a mangled, post-industrial grit. It clanks and sputters, but is firmly grounded in a world that humans and machines have saturated with waste. A longtime affiliate of the pioneering post-club label Night Slugs, Egyptrixx has evolved his sound far past the dancefloor, onto another planet entirely. In 2015, he founded his own label, Halocline Trance, as an outlet for mostly beatless productions that didn’t quite fit in with the woozy, DJ-ready template of Night Slugs. Just last year, Psutka unveiled a new project as Ceramic TL, where he painted paranoid and scathing noise-scapes that pointed to his fascination with ecological destruction. One of his tracks “Life on Earth,” is a scathing assault of noise which doesn’t allow room for any life whatsoever. We caught up with Egyptrixx to get a break down of his influences, and what to look forward to in his show in New York.

Pure, Beyond Reproach is out now via Halocline Trance.

AdHoc: Pure, Beyond Reproach has a geological sound to it—subterranean rivers, massive clanking boulders, caves echoing, dripping, squelching sounds. Was there a specific place (or places) that you visited or imagined that inspired the album?

Egyptrixx: Yes, it’s definitely an emotional and material meditation on the Pacific trash vortex in the Pacific Ocean.

The sound of bubbling water appears throughout your last album and in your recent DJ mix for Resident Advisor. What does the presence of water mean to you?

This album channels and recreates an imaginary percussion of all the oceanic micro-plastics colliding among themselves—petroleum garbage jostling in the tides, basically. Like these toxic plastics, the sound lives in, is framed by, and adulterates the water. From another perspective the sound of this record is powerful and essential, which makes me think of water.

One of my favorite tracks of yours is called “Water,” also one of your most straight-up club productions. In some ways you’ve departed from that club-oriented template, though. Have your production interests changed?

The Egyptrixx project has pretty much always centered on the same basic idea of sampling structural and experiential ideas from club music and expressing them in different, sometimes unconventional ways—it’s still an exciting idea to me. Across the material I believe there is a strong continuity in how I write the songs and how they feel. This somewhat binary test of whether a song can be played on conventional dance club floors literally never occurs to me and doesn’t really comes up during writing and recording.

What can we look forward to for your show in New York?

I’ll be doing a live set of material from the new album. It’ll be powerful and positive—I can’t wait!

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