NORTHERN EXPOSURE: Mixmaster Shadow - Mixdominus Villainous

Northern Exposure is a weekly feature where I (Mark) present you with something from the underground of Canadian music.

Genre tags on bandcamp help a lot. A quick search of a tag that you like will spit back a bunch of music that you can then take a look through. A lot of these tags appear fairly often together, like “punk” and “rock” for example. So it’s interesting when you find an album or a few tracks on bandcamp where the genres don’t seem to fit together at all, which is the case with Mixmaster Shadow’s release in January of this year. The three tracks on Mixdominus Villainous are tagged both “electronic” and “post rock instrumental”, which isn’t something I’ve never heard of before, but it’s certainly not something you hear on a regular basis. I had to listen to this release after seeing those tags, and to my surprise Mixmaster Shadows music is a fairly accurate blend of both electronic music and post rock. The EP starts out with “Black Stone Prophecy” which has a driving beat like you’d hear in a lot of electronic songs but coupled with some sharp and ethereal sounding guitars. It’s probably the most electronic feeling of the three tracks. “Witch House” (which doesn’t sound like a witch house song at all) is on the more post rock side of things with a prevalent acoustic guitar riff, but with some occasional breakdowns featuring some glitchy sound electronics. It even comes in with some piano in the final minute or so of the song. The last track “Last Chance Play” sounds like it could break out into a clubby dubstep number for the first minute, but instead it turns into a pretty uplifting and bright sounding jam. So whether or not the music on this EP is actually good is up to you, but it’s an interesting mix of sounds, one that I certainly didn’t expect. As per usual, have a listen down below.