York Factory Complaint’s Lost In The Spectacle With NPR

YORK FACTORY COMPLAINT SHARES NEW TRACK WITH NPR
LOST IN THE SPECTACLE OUT NEXT WEEK!

York Factory Complaint formed in 2009 as a two-piece, but within a year and a half, founding members Ryan Martin (co-founder of Dais Records) and Michael Berdan (Drunkdriver, Veins, Believer/Law) had worked with live collaborators from Genesis Breyer P-Orridge to Domokos of Future Blondes. The band’s permanent membership also swelled to four with the addition of Theresa Smith and Michael Yaniro. After a series of recordings with the newly expanded lineup, Smith and Yaniro left the group in 2012. Lost in the Spectacle, YFC’s first release for Accidental Guest Recordings, is the result of the original, streamlined duo of Martin and Berdan formalizing the sound of their project in the studio for the first time since the departure of their former bandmates. It’s also the definitive statement of where the band stands today.

Band member Ryan Martin had this to say about the concept of the record:

“Thematically (which is heavily referenced in the title and photo/design of the record), the album has a two pronged idea behind it. Given the title “Lost In The Spectacle,” the album is a jumbled reference to the ideal of why the band was started through a “situationist looking glass”. During the time of the bands formation, the cultural climate in the band’s immediate location (NYC/Brooklyn) was very much in a disruptive state of flux. Art and culture whom we both respected and admired up until that point started to shift into being about a very polished smokescreen reminiscent of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. People got caught up in fairly bogus ideas and sounds. We both found this all to be alarming and someone abhorrent (as reflected in Berdan’s song titles on the album), it was the underground turning into dazed, sponsored masses. While people agree that it was all bullshit now, our take on that world was very unpopular at the time. It is still going on, but has taken much different forms nowadays.

Aesthetically, during the recording of the LP, we had been taking in some articles and texts involving brutalism and the notion that brutalist designers were recruited to pacify political and ideological dissent in the 60’s and 70’s (which was carried out, though to what effect is very debatable) which fell quickly out of popularity by the 80’s. Thus bringing us back to the situationist theme of people being “lost in the spectacle” of what was being put in front of them while the cultural powers that be reinforced this premise by constructing a brutalist style prism of manufactured nonsense to keep everyone quiet.”
Conceived as a sort of sonic embodiment of Martin and Berdan’s increasingly disgusted worldview, Lost in the Spectacle builds around its noisy industrial back- bone with surprising, beat-driven passages and intense, all-too-human vocals. For an album so unrelenting, though, it offers a certain accessibility that’s uncom- mon in contemporary noise music. Lost in the Spectacle is an extended hand, an invitation to the impressive work Martin and Berdan are doing. It’s immediately striking, but repeated listens reveal its depth. This is a statement record, and the message comes through loud and clear: Tune out the bullshit. This is what’s real.

Mastered by Kris Lapke & features design by Mark McCoy (Youth Attack Records / Failures)