Rising From the Lake of Dracula
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“I was pretty bored with a lot of what was going on, and I didn’t really feel like starting another band,” says Magas, lamenting the underground rock scene’s lack of imagination. But then he saw Quintron and Wolf Eyes, two bands with connections to the no-wave scene, using drum machines. “I thought, ‘That’s pretty easy. You can make the machines do the work.’” Magas knew nothing about techno or electronic gear, but he bought himself a Roland MC-505, which allowed him to integrate synthetic rhythm tracks, bass lines, and polyphonic melody lines. As he was teaching himself to program the machine he began listening to electronic dance music for the first time in his life, and three years later his twin obsessions occupy most of his time. Since fall 2000 he and his wife, Bridgette Wilson, have operated Weekend Records and Soap, a Wicker Park shop that specializes in underground electronic music and Wilson’s homemade soap. And a few weeks ago Detroit’s Ersatz Audio imprint released Bad Blood, Magas’s second EP of minimal electronic music. Lake of Dracula may have celebrated confusion, but Bad Blood is just as unnerving in its creepy, machinelike repetition.
Magas unveiled his appealingly primitive MC-505 music on the self-released EP Double-Sided Magas (2000): stripped-down and boxed in, the music pulses stiffly as deep but simple bass tones and melodic synth squiggles dance around the programmed rhythms. The record sold only 350 copies, but its mechanical intensity impressed Adam Lee Miller, co-owner of Ersatz Audio, and last fall Magas traveled to Detroit to record Bad Blood at Miller’s studio. “I wanted to go to him with an open mind because the records [Ersatz] do sound really good and powerful,” says Magas. “The record I did sounded quiet and murky.” The new record retains the robotic twitchiness of Double-Sided Magas, but the beats kick much harder, the synthesizers throb more insistently, and even without the basic building blocks of rock–guitar, bass, and drums–the tracks are honest to God head bangers.
