.SYS Machine

Dave:  Ha I’d love to tell you there’s a really clever backstory with a dramatic arc, but it’s probably one of the nerdiest backstories ever to be committed to Brutal Resonance.  It’s a play on the MS Dos file extension .sys which is basically the extension of all your drives and configurations that make your machine go.  So, when I started it, I wanted to call it something that sort of conveyed (if only to myself) that the tracks are sort of the drivers for the electronic side of my stuff.   So yeah—it’s literally me likening the project to device drives and config files on a computer!  It’s funny because, particularly with Graceful Isolation, it’s really gone beyond that and is a real expression and collaboration among a lot of folks.   But the name is sort of interesting, so I kept it. 
Dave:  Sys Machine really started life as a way for me to practice my programming and synth chops.  I’d get a new synth or some plugin, or even just try a new workflow and the science experiments that came out of that would be what I’d put out.  It wasn’t really a hard transition stylistically.  With Derision Cult, I feel pretty deliberate—in that I set out to make something sound a certain way playing a certain way with guitar driven songwriting.   I rarely, if ever do the Sys Machine stuff with a guitar as a starting point.  That in and of itself puts everything in a different setting.  Detachment Stage was sort of another science experiment.  Prior to sitting down to do it, I started getting curious/interested in the ASMR craze on YouTube and how those recordings are made.  I started playing around with binaural mixing and so forth and that’s a big part of how those tracks came to be.  I also made them in a really short period of time set against some crazy world events which I think probably contributed to the EP.  I didn’t really take time to second guess things.   
Dave:  Yeah, Detachment Stage is really interesting to look back and think about for me now that we’ve had a couple years away from that period when I made it!  As I mentioned I did it over a really short period of time—a weekend really.  I did it the week Covid really broke out in Turin Italy (if you recall that was the first place in the Western Hemisphere things got really bad).  A really good friend of mine is a professor at a college there and was live blogging about what was going on.  At the dawn of the pandemic, none of us had any idea what was in store.  My heart really went out to people there…. I love Italy.  I used to spend time in Rome for work back in my agency days and my wife went to school in Arezzo.  Italian people have always been really kind and welcoming to me when I’ve been there, so it was really heartbreaking to hear the stories coming in about Turin. So, the song titles were kind of my nod to them at that time.  That was also right when everything was about “15 days to flatten the curve” where lockdowns first became part of reality and anxiety levels were off the charts. So that’s where the name Detachment Stage came from.  I’d been wanting to play around with binaural mixing and ASMR and I thought making some calming really warm sounding synth tracks would be a good counterpoint to how the world felt that week.    So, if you listen to it with headphones on there’s some tracks that should cause some tingles.  THC definitely helps with that I’ve found! 
Dave:  Kim is awesome!  It just so happened she had done a track with Microwaved that I liked a lot and Gabe from that project is a good buddy of mine.   He made an intro and I showed her what I had been working on.  When I first thought about working with a female vocalist, I was thinking about projects like Collide and Atomica- both of which are things I’m a huge fan of.   Kim caught on to that, but pretty quickly she came back with approaches that took them to a new place.  A good example of that is Poison in My Skin.  She added a really dark element to it, just the lyrics along, but then the chorus’s repeat really drew elements like the organ out.   Then we handed that to Assemblage 23 and his remix really played on that theme!   
Dave:  Remixes in general are really new ground for me.  If I’d done remixes of my stuff, it’d be either me doing it or Gabe from Microwaved.   Gabe and I were chatting about the tracks, and he suggested that I should see if some other artists would be interested in them since they’re pretty minimal and leave a lot of room for interpretation.   Kim does a TON of remixes, so she was really encouraging as well.  From there, between the three of us, we just started making a list of people we thought would be fun to have involved. Over the course of last spring and summer I got busy reaching out and seeing what’s what with everybody’s interest and availability.  It’s a new pretty obscure project so I really had not idea what kind of responses I’d get.  I don’t think my batting average was too bad at all.  I didn’t really give people any instructions, I really wanted them to do whatever they felt would be cool.  They don’t need notes from me to do what makes them tick.  The end result is some pretty wild interpretations. Now Graceful Isolation spans a bunch of genres within a genre. 
Dave:  I called the Track Graceful Isolation because nobody was in the same room when we made it!  Kim is in Maine, I’m in Chicago.  The remixers are from all over the US and Europe.   When I listen to the tracks Kim wrote, I hear a lot of themes of walking away from bad situations and being stronger for it.   Her album that also came out last year called Let it Burn really touches on a lot of themes like that too.  It’s funny because I didn’t really think about this until well after the album was out- but there was almost a bit of telepathy going on because when you listen to Kim’s tracks, that sense of walking away from something and being stronger for it are kind of esoteric in nature – they could apply to a job, or a relationship, or just a bad place.   Mine is more about substances, but’s a variation on the same theme.  I quit drinking last year after a long and storied career as a beer and whiskey guzzling Irishman.  I don’t have any great rock bottom stories or anything like that—I’d just reached a point where I’d grown out of being that guy.  But anybody whose given up drinking or smoking or whatever your vice happens to be knows it’s pretty daunting.   I really wanted to say something about that feeling and also what I’d say to myself leading up to pulling the trigger on that decision having a few months on the other side.  I think mine and Kim’s tracks are a lot alike in the sense that they both deal in being better off walking away from something.  
Dave:  Well Sys Machine will take a while to fire up again, but Kim and I are talking about ideas!  My main focus this year is on the next Derision Cult project.  I’m really excited about that.  I’m working with Sean Payne from Cyanotic and Conformco on it.   So far, we’ve got demos we’re working through, but I’m really excited about that.  He’s bringing this sort of old school Wax Trax feel to my thrash metal-ish things and taking the production to a whole new level.  I’ve also got some other collaborators we’re talking to that- if it all comes together- will really make that a cool project.  My dream scenario would be to have that available by the end of the year.   In the meantime, I’m playing guitar on a few things here and there.    
Dave:  Yeah!  So, I’ve been doing some housekeeping on both Derision Cult and Sys Machine.  2021 really felt like a new beginning on both projects.  I put real effort into promoting them – especially Sys Machine and I’d spent the past – shit 8 years tinkering away by myself just doing my thing.  Those Eps to me kind of represent what it took to get to this spot.  I didn’t necessarily want to wipe the slate or throw it all away, but I thought it was kind of silly to have 15 of these EP’s and what not on Derision Cult that people getting into what I’m doing this year would be sort of overwhelmed.  So, I made it easy for people if they want to check out all those things and that’s what Beta Versions is.  It adds up! There are 47 tracks there of various instrumental and sometimes vocal electronic tracks.  I did the same thing with Derision Cult for everything before 2020 called Prior Machines and that’s 95 tracks and remixes I did over a 6-year period.  The artwork for both were done by Greg Rolfes of Eleven 12 design.   It’s funny you say demos because I don’t necessarily think of them that way in the traditional sense, but I think that’s kind of what they are compared to where I’m at now.  
Dave:  You can check out all the videos for Sys Machine, as well as Derision Cult and all my acoustic stuff on my YouTube Channel.  I’m adding stuff there quite a bit on the acoustic/alt-country front too if you’re so inclined.