Wetware

ISSUE commemorates the close of the 2018 season with a special year-end event featuring avant-garde industrial duo Wetware, as well as a rare collaborative performance between vocal artist, composer, and writer Shelley Hirsch & artist/musician Marcia Bassett. Cross-disciplinary artist and 2013 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence James Hoff DJs around the performances.

Revitalizing the urgent energy of early experimental industrial music alongside contemporary urban malice, Wetware’s music has quickly become revered within NYC’s underground. The project thrives on unease, with Roxy Farman’s prowling, anxious vocalizations ranging from deadpan poetics to humming, whispering, and screeching. Matthew Morandi’s tense sound design -- at-once decidedly abstract and constantly visceral -- establishes a truly alien sonic backbone that exists at the edges of rhythm. The result is an uncompromising, dystopic sound -- like “street garbage caught in an updraft -- using both technology and the human voice and body to create a “devastating portrait of a society in peril.”

Formed in 2015, Wetware eased into its performative role with their live shows around their home base of Brooklyn, NY. Vocalist Roxy Farman, who’s familiar voice was last heard on Drew McDowall’s “Unnatural Channel” album, stole audience’s attention immediately, using her body in tandem with her voice as a weaponized vehicle for the band’s anxiety filled performance. Matthew Morandi cut his teeth in the electronic music world through his solo tech-industrial project Jahiliyya Fields and partner to Inhalants, the techno collaboration of Morandi and Max Ravitz (Patricia). The synergy that’s developed between Farman and Morandi has been explosive. Wetware’s live antics and behavior has caused alarm amongst their local audiences, making Wetware the group to “not be missed” on any particular bill that they are allowed to take part in. Wetware stepped out from their live persona and self-recorded a selection of songs that viewers had grown accustomed to and were debuted on the flawlessly curated Primitive Languages imprint. Shortly following their recorded premier was an EP collection of demo recordings on the much praised Bank NYC label. Once the band reconciled with documenting their work, they set out, with the help of engineer Kris Lapke (Alberich / Hospital Productions) to formalize their most recent output in the context of their first full length album entitled “Automatic Drawing”.