Aulic Veil will release a new EP, ‘Rescue & Research Pt. 5’, on Failed Units later this week. Have an exclusive first listen to ‘Sneerer’ below.
With the ground still rumbling from his July EP, ‘A-V_006-010’, the DJ and producer emerges from the mountains of the US Interior Highlands once more with a new suite of clamorous club mutations. With touchstones in UK bass weight and underground Midwestern techno, ‘Rescue & Research Pt. 5’ – out 13th September – is nothing short of earth-shattering, pairing shrill metallic textures and malforming basslines with some seriously spine-chilling synth work.
Our pick of the bunch is the A1 ‘Sneerer’: a nightmarish lullaby cooked up from clattering rhythms, abstract club sonics and rib-rattling kicks. Spin at your own peril.
In a statement about the release, Aulic Veil said: “This EP is a collection of tracks I had worked on while touring Europe in the autumn of 2023. I'm from Fayetteville Arkansas, a place where there isn't really any serious electronic music culture, at least for what I'm interested in. To give you an idea of the landscape, my earliest exposure to the medium was hearing an old school reverse bass hardstyle song at a demolition derby over a cheap rodeo stadium soundsystem, some time in the early 2010s. This singular event altered the course of my life forever, I immediately knew that I wanted to make music. I scrounged together enough money to buy FL Studio and FM8 and never looked back. I was completely obsessed with it, totally and utterly hyper fixated on electronic music and electronic music alone. There weren't any outlets for my passion, but it drove me to become an autodidact.
“As you can imagine, I had very minimal experience playing live and this first tour was really like a huge experiment for me. Testing to see what worked and what didn't and iterating upon old demos in TGV duplexes. ‘Sneerer’ is one of the songs that made the cut. I used an idiosyncratic palette of sound material from a variety of sources: FM and additive sequences, spectral resampling from esoteric non-realtime programs, and acousmatic textures conjured by the Csound API. On paper this seems like a good recipe for clearing the floor immediately but it was surprisingly effective when I played it out, thanks to the club-adjacent contextualisation. The track was heavily informed by a diverse range of influences spanning back to my teenage years when I made over-distorted dirty south beats, to my later discoveries of Midwestern techno and UK bass, as well as my 2015-onward deconstructed club illumination. The main hook evokes some sort of speculative crunkcore before its abrupt climax.
“These songs represent a major transitional period in my work, a period between silly melodic bedroom club music and the more abstract stuff I make today. I attribute this growth to my immersion in the various scenes of Europe, specifically: France, Berlin, Budapest. These cities all had such amazing and supportive communities and I owe so much to all my friends who helped organise events for me. I dedicate this EP to them. Big up to the Narthex team (Simone, Jules, Audrey, Maxina, Mia, et al,) Thomas Romana and the Failed Units crew, and Gergely Csontos and Várhelyi Valentina as well as their Marmint Agency/111records affiliates. Thank you all for everything!”
‘Rescue & Research Pt. 5’ is out 13th September on Failed Units. Pre-save the project here, and have an exclusive first listen to ‘Sneerer’ below.