For a really long time, the science fiction subgenre of cyberpunk has been, in a way, infested with the more hopeful sound of synthwave. Well, it's not wrong to connect them that way because of the collective imagination the media has imposed on us about cyberpunk aesthetics. The neon lights, eternal buildings sprawling hundreds of floors, the oriental looking signs, and a generally loud yet beautiful landscape are what comes to mind to many.
But this is just a facade; a way to keep us blind to what's actually happening in this world. And Orquídeas em Prosa, a Brazilian Harsh EBM duo, bring the tools needed to inject a daemon into our root system and show us the reality of what an actual "high tech, low life" world really looks like.
With just an almost 5-minutes track, this anarcho-industrialists show that they were not joking around when titling it Lady Death: the catchy drums and bassline are the perfect music for a death march, looking to take the lives of the corpos dominating our planet or die trying, much like how the real Lady Death, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, took the life of 309 nazi soldiers with her incredible sniping skills iron will against death, transforming her into a living legend.
The song has a nicely applied unpolished finish, in which the overuse of distortion is neither overwhelming nor underused, with sometimes an almost "sampled" repetitiveness that reminds me, in a way, of the first wave of German Digital Hardcore. These two things give the track an analog feeling that many artists try to achieve but fail miserably.
As good EBM music should, this track gets the danceable-yet-mosheable feeling of this subgenre perfectly, reminding me of the first time I went to an underground rave just to use the whole music I listened there in my small Cyberpunk 2020 campaign almost 1o years ago. (Matter of fact, this song is so good you kinda convinced me to start a new table again. Anyone wants to relearn the system with me?).
The lyrics are also one of the best parts of the track. Direct to the point, militant and political, the kind you may only get in either old school grindcore bands that still cared about being DIY and didn't try to be obnoxious 24/7; and still are something innovative in the now never risky panorama that electronic music has become.
Anyway, just some heads-up to anyone listening this: be wary of not becoming a cyberpsycho after having your mainframe blasted by this amazing project.