Altered Zones

From out of Gunk TV's bubbling pop culture cauldron comes this new video from Raw Thrills, aka Zak Mering, aka one-half of Brooklyn's Greatest Hits. "Cyborg Wars," a track he recorded when the duo were tracking their debut LP in Paris this Summer, is inspired by the Euro club sounds he encountered while out painting the town with bandmate Tyler Thacker. Now that he's given it the Gunk TV treatment, you can watch as space robots battle it out Gladiator-style over a soundtrack of skittish trance synths and bass that's as colossal, warped, and blown-out as a bad case of elephant flatulence. It certainly doesn't sound like anything we've heard from Mering before, and I can't really describe his take on the idiom without falling back on a phrase he suggested himself, which is "[doing it with] gangster conviction." --Emilie Friedlander, Altered Zones

Completely out of nowhere, Zak Mering dropped a bomb in my inbox. Between his work in Greatest Hits, Raw Thrills, and everything else under his Gunk TV umbrella, I’m pretty used to this dude impressing me with whatever he sends my way, but the recent collab with Tallahassee producer Dream Love is some of the more unique work I’ve heard from the Brooklyn-via-LA transplant. Dream Love's blown-out synth acrobatics with Mering's deliciously detuned vocals on the warbly “Love Juice” teeter between a lost b-side from cult Italo disco producer John Forde and the background music of seminal '80s arcade racing game Outrun. Full of twists, turns, and handclaps, this is one jam you’ll have a hard time driving away from. --Ric Leichtung, Altered Zones

MP3: Dream Love: "Love Juice (Feat. Raw Thrills)"

Look out for the Love Juice cassingle, coming soon from Noise Horror

If you missed out on our MP3 post of Greatest Hits' "perfectly dead-pan electro-pop cover" of Harry Nilsson's "Ten Little Indians" because you were in Austin partying at Moby's Vegan BBQ, we forgive you. Just posted on Gunk TV Records, this video feautres footage of our lovable weirdos running amok in a museum spliced with massive explosions and apocalyptic devastation.  --Ric Leichtung, Altered Zones

MP3: Greatest Hits: "Ten Little Indians"

Stay tuned for more info on their forthcoming EP on French label Maman Records. In the meantime, get a load of this cheesed-out Raw Thrills (Zak Mering's side-project) and Maria Minerva collaboration:

"It seems to me that there are three places you can stumble on [an idea for a song]. One, of course, is just that you have the fortune of an idea falling out of the sky fully formed. Another way is to sit at a keyboard, sit at an instrument and just fucking play around for hours and hours until you find something that kind of surprises you. It’s kind of like forcing that moment of inspiration to come. And the third way is by making a mistake. Like when you're in the middle of something and something gets put in the wrong place and it works perfectly."

-- John Maus in a 2008 interview with Zak Mering of Raw Thrills/Greatest Hits/Vital Caress/The Sweethearts, dug up from the Misshapes archives. We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves LP is out sooner than later on Upset the Rhythm

MP3: John Maus: "And The Rain"

On his new Shakedown LP, Raw Thrills offers 14 new tracks of falsetto croons over soft-muffle guitars, drum machine thud, and outer space synthesizers -- often dipping into '50s doo-wop loverboy mode. There's the luxurious tones of "Making Love on a Piano". There's the tropical bounce of "Coconuts". There's "Sonia", something bleak and cold, something that might normally have a super deep-voiced guy gutting in the background, like Silk Flowers. Instead, Zak Mering floats in higher registers, layering voices into a choir effect that -- coupled with vibraphone sounds (or something) -- gets real deep on some Church of X-Files business. (via Friendship Bracelet)

MP3: Raw Thrills: "Sonia"

Buy Shakedown LP from Japanese label Sixteen Tambourines when it drops early next year. I think Zak said something about a few hundred copies being TEAL and the rest being black, or the other way around, so look out for that