VR SEX - Hard Copy - VINYL LP

Following 2022's Rough Dimension LP, Noel Skum - aka Andrew Clinco of Drab Majesty - made the radical leap of expanding his psychedelic post-punk vehicle VR S*x into a fully collaborative five-piece band. To christen the new group's camaraderie, they booked a block of studio time in Glassell Park, swapped skeletal iPhone demos, and Inchdid that classic thing of a band making the exact record they want without any interference.Inch Working 12-hour days, they banged out the basics in a week, then tracked the rest over a month, fine-tuning it with flourishes, FX, and amplifier experiments. Hard Copy is the result - 10 tracks of sneering psychedelic punk streaked with Chrome-damaged freak-outs and snotty power pop harmonies chronicling S*x doll love affairs and glue-sniffing fatales. Mixed by guitarist Mike Kriebel - an accomplished engineer with dozens of credits across the punk, goth, and garage underground - the album is dense, rich, and spatial, spurred by Clinco's muse of Inchreckless abandon.Inch Shadows of Chrome, Stickmen With Rayguns, Japanese psych, and loud-quiet-loud grunge anthems flicker here and there, but ultimately VR S*x's mode is more sardonic and saturated, oscillating between ripped leather riffing and space echo meltdowns. Banning plug-ins was a mission statement, with most instruments tracked direct into the board, then guitars added via a daisy chain of amplifiers, panned and mixed and matched for maximum intoxication InchMy goal is always to load up every take with as much sound as possible in one pass.InchLyrically, the record revisits the project's perennial fascinations twisted lust, cheap thrills, dirty money, doomed delinquents, and ruined romance amid the creeps and cracked dreamers of gritty city voids. The title refers to the uncanny valley between Inchfacsimile and the real thing, and the illusion that one is better than the other - whe

The latest by Andrew Clinco's acid punk alias VR S*x takes it's title from an architectural phrase but more importantly refers to the warped, wicked underworld the songs both chronicle and condemn. Donning the moniker Noel Skum - an acerbic anagram of Elon Musk - Clinco vents his scorn for and fascination with the seedy, surreal margins of low-life Los Angeles, doomed to dead ends of vanity, lust, and technology. Although initially launched as an outlet for Inchheavier soundsInch beyond Clinco's duties in new wave fantasists Drab Majesty, the project has ripened into a compelling exercise in world building, weaving themes of gritty city neo- futurist sleaze within a framework of driving, distorted guitars and cathode-blasted synths. Echoes of Chrome, Wire, Minimal Man, and Sisters Of Mercy ripple through the collection but ultimately Rough Dimension charts it's own twisted vision of Inchour unforgiving reality.InchWritten and demoed across two weeks alone in a Marseille flat using his prized 1980's Gibson InchInvaderInch and a laptop, Clinco then took the tracks to Strange Weather studios in Brooklyn to record with Ben Greenberg (Uniform, The Men) who helmed 2019's debut, Human Traffic Jam. The results are notably ripping, refined, and riveting. Riffs in alternate tunings chug and churn over mid-tempo drums punctuated by spikes of sci-fi electronics while the vocals swagger and spit venom (Inchwhere we walk is also where we S**t / but if we bark at our reflections are we hypocrites? / impulses bleed right into our seed / where hate culminates the apple rotted on the treeInch). It's a bristling mix of the melodic and the macabre, absurdist observations of fast living and desperate measures, the clock of youth ticking towards midnight as dreams unravel in Babylon.VR S*x's specialty is making these cautionary tales of psychic decay and tainted love a thrill rather than a

Vinyl LP pressing. Technology was meant to be humanity's tool to combat famine, disease, confusion, and to facilitate life, culture, and innovation. Instead, we're mired in a digital labyrinth that few care to navigate or even solve. Perhaps it's not a ruse and the matrices coded by keyboard maestros are a path to liberation, but without querying the constructs we cannot ruminate on their affectations on humanity. VR S*x are audio/visual provocateurs who transpose the identifiers of death rock, synth punk, post-punk, ambient, and ethereal soundscapes into an audit on technology and it's imprint on our collective psyche. Comprised of visionary mercenaries Noel Skum (Andrew Clinco of Drab Majesty), Z. Oro (Aaron Montaigne of Antioch Arrow/Heroin/DBC) on vocals and drums, and Mico Frost (Brian Tarney) on synths and electric bass. Their debut tome, Human Traffic Jam, focuses on lyrical themes that probe the possibilities of loss of autonomy through social media, the decline of human interaction, and celebrity favoritism. Skum believes in the stabilization of society and preservation of our planet by reducing it's amount of procreators. Through PSRS or Procreation Simulation Reproduction Stimulation, humans can act on their hedonistic desires and not face the responsibilities and consequences that come with being an ill-prepared guardian. The future of our offspring will exist in virtual realms and population growth in turn will be stabilized. VR S*x is the cure to most societal ills. Thematically condensed into an eight song album, Human Traffic Jam was written and demoed by Skum in a flat in Athens, Greece during the winter of 2017. During a rigorous week long session at Figure 8 studios with experimental and dimensional production extraordinaire Ben Greenberg (Uniform/The Men), Skum solely committed all the instrumentation present on Human Traffic Jam. Rather than being