8485 - Software Gore

"software gore, released serially with singles goreblog and Something bad, reveals 8485 working at the edge of her world-building multimedia approach. Through the trilogy’s suspenseful rollout, 8485 offers glimpses beyond the music in odd social media posts, confessional videos, and updates to personalprotocol.net, a point-and-click game created with pseudonymous web developer beyondthecrag. Puzzle pieces refer back to the screen names of unknown figures, creating a picture where lines of reality and identity blur, and a fragmented story 8485 insists “should be treated as fiction”. 

Like the shadowy narrative surrounding software gore, the trilogy’s abrasive textures and sudden mood swings keep the listener on edge: as soon as its dense, sharp-edged layers have set a scene, they cut to another. software gore stitches together alt- and glitch-pop with elements spanning as far as deconstructed club, lo-fi, and digital hardcore. This varied sonic palette owes in part to the project’s eclectic roster: alongside production mainstay blackwinterwells, 8485 recruits Crash Blossoms’ Murrumur, producer and fellow scene alum Glasear, and Berlin ambient polymath bod [包家巷]. Eighty’s songwriting is equally mercurial, describing in brief vignettes a gruesome road trip, an exposed secret, and a sci-fi abduction, interrupted between chapters by voices in an interrogation room. Of the project, 8485 writes “I wanted software gore to look, sound and feel equally synthetic and visceral. When you stumble across something online and you can’t figure out where it came from, it has its own kind of reality. I hope we can leave it at that.”

The vague surrealism of software gore culminates in otherworldly chaos with closing track ANTHROPOL, featuring vocals and production from blackwinterwells and Murrumur. Mutating from the artists’ shared obsession with sci-fi and heavy electronic music, ANTHROPOL fuses dubstep and digital hardcore with distorted melodies, violently glitching synths and harsh vocals. While its precursor Something bad hides dark impulses “underneath my bed, in my head and my pockets and bags”, ANTHROPOL brings them out under the fluorescent light of a bizarre cyberpunk operating table. Shouting against the rip of a screeching guitar, Eighty and Murrumur conjure a true image of “software gore” with the hook “Couple of crossed wires / Caught in the crossfire”. Leaning further into total cyberpunk indulgence, the track’s final moments see the artists declaring themselves “the end of the world dot com”."

- PR RELEASE