COUNTERMARCH – Skin of Perception – Release date TBA.
On their upcoming debut album, Skin of Perception, the Copenhagen duo Countermarch explores a musical fusion of tempestuous ambient, horror-hip-hop, and gothic country. It is a dusty and comprehensive universe that revolves around the paradoxes between accessibility and technology – between artist and machine.
Countermarch consists of Arsene Survie (Deadpan, Syringe) and Martin Funder (Deadpan, Music By Idiots), both driven by a passion for simple, manifesting rhythms shaped by dogmatic boundaries between context, form, and error.
In 2020, Countermarch released The Blues According to Logic, an EP reinterpreting the hopelessness of traditional blues. On the debut album Skin of Perception, the sound once again stems from the power of sampling to distort and recontextualize fragments of fleeting realities, creating small ephemeral bubbles of imperfection.
“In Countermarch, we work with an almost sports-like dogma of allowing as many mistakes as possible to carry through to the final result.”
Countermarch echoes the forgotten and esoteric. It is the sound of dusty samples, soothing synth layers, brutal noise, and intimidating crooning vocals. The simple and direct lyrics pave the way for a surreal, cinematic, and liminal universe:
“As if David Lynch was only poetry!”
The debut album’s far-reaching instrumentation is bound together by Countermarch’s eclectic production and performed by an ensemble featuring Nina Larsen (XONina), Zeki Jindyll (Narcosatanicos, J. Ludvig III), Patrick Rathburn (Pardans), Adrian Barstad Andersen (Lucky Lo), Uffe Nørtoft, and Simon Plank. Additionally, Hans Gustav Björklund Moulvad (Mavourneen, Soap Horse) and Malthe Madsen (Erika De Casier, Okay Kaya) contribute as engineers and co-producers.
The album’s many contributors help weave connections across genre boundaries and musical expertise, resulting in a hall of mirrors that makes the album an intense, fragile, and boundary-challenging listening experience.
Check out the earlier releases by COUNTERMARCH below.