News I by I 04.09.15

Mystery surrounds Kaoss Edge, 90s band cited as influence by Oneohtrix Point Never

UPDATE: The band behind the Kaoss Edge picture speak out.

The supposed image of Kaoss Edge pictured above actually belongs to a musician named Daniel Bromfield, who explained on our Facebook page that it’s the cover of his 2013 album Either Everyone Gets To Be A Virgin Or No One Does. As he put it, “Dirty Lopatin snoopin around Bandcamp”.

Reddit is attempting to unravel the “history” of the group cited in the Garden Of Delete announcement.

Daniel Lopatin recently announced his next album Garden Of Delete with a PDF message to his fans that made mention of a band called Kaoss Edge and a “juvenile deliquent” called Ezra, who interviewed him on Blogspot about the album.

Nobody really questioned it until a few days ago, when tracks from Kaoss Edge under the genre heading “hypergrunge” appeared via their label Konfrontation Records on SoundCloud. Now, some fans believe it’s part of an elaborate alternate reality game with chunks of the next Oneohtrix Point Never album dotted around the internet.

As you can hear above, they sound a lot like album track ‘I Bite Through This’, leading some to believe they might actually be by Lopatin.

Intriguingly, Kaoss Edge have a website, linked to from the bottom left-hand corner of the Oneohtrix Point Never website. It’s password-protected, but the Reddit hivemind has figured out the login details via a network of Twitter accounts for the mysterious Ezra and Kaoss Edge themselves.

Those going deep into the site have discovered MIDI files (presumably the ones posted to Lopatin via Fedex he mentions in the earlier PDF), and one person believes the lyrics for Kaoss Edge’s ‘Looking Glass’ are actually soundfiles from a Warhammer 40,000 video game. People have also discovered another snippet of Kaoss Edge music on YouTube, posted by Ezra.

Lopatin has talked of being inspired by Nine Inch Nails while making Garden Of Delete, and that it’s something of a rock-inspired album – a description that could easily be applied to these tracks by Kaoss Edge. Similarly, Nine Inch Nails crafted an alternate reality game around the release of 2007’s Year Zero.

If you want to investigate the band’s 90s website yourself, you can do so here and find the necessary information to do so on Reddit – just be prepared to lose many hours doing so, and probably a bit of your mind as you browse what looks frighteningly like an internet dungeon developed by a Quake enthusiast.

We’ll find out for sure when Garden Of Delete is released on Warp on November 13. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time the label has been involved in a cryptic press campaign.

Read this next: Oneohtrix Point Never talks re-appropriation and growing up a teenage Tarantino freak

Latest

Latest



		
	
Share Tweet