Dan Hillier
Yet whilst many other acts in their shoes would be currently clambering out of such obscure caverns, the darkness and shade of where they currently stand seem to suit the band fine, thank you very much. Comprised of two strictly anonymous members with seemingly ex-lives in the math and post rock scene, Overrider are essentially an enigma and an anomaly both in terms of their creative approach and presentation; factors that allow them to be a product of deep intrigue by those loyal to the deepest chambers of the scene in which they inhabit.
A self-proclaimed product of nocturnal productivity and sounding like “shoegaze x breakcore, but with the attention-span of The Dillinger Escape Plan”, Overrider tread the line between fervent electronica and introspective post-rock. Whilst this isn’t an entire a new proposition – with artists such as 65daysofstatic, Luo, Clipping, Three Trapped Tigers and Fuck Buttons already mastering the sound – what separates Overrider from their peers musically is their execution.
Firstly, the band utterly reject most social media, with Instagram and Bandcamp being the only ways to communicate with the duo in any way. Secondly, released at the height of the pandemic last year was Cyc|er, the duo’s debut and a record that had it’s genesis lie in semi-random algorithmic composition. Instead of being crafted traditionally, the record was cultivated through various pre-generated textures prior to being completed with additional instrumentation and mixing. Yes, whilst this somewhat sounds like a lifeless ordeal, the record was anything but creatively sterile. Deeply contemplative and highly unique, Cyc|er served as a bridge between computable design and unquantifiable creativity and was an introduction to a band most unorthodox.
It’s been approximately a year since the release of that record and clearly the past twelve months have been a time of productivity of the band. Overrider may still harbour a staunch anti-social media mindset but this month saw the band unveil two avatars encapsulating their sound created by the legendary designer Boneface, popularised by his work for CRX, Queens Of The Stone Age and the Hotline Miami, No More Heroes and Deadpool franchises.
Tailing this first initial look at the band was the quiet release of their brilliant second effort The City Eats The Stranger // The Sky Eats The City. Made available for free download via their Bandcamp and featuring inclusions from Cleft’s John Simm and mastering from Tom Peters of Alpha Male Tea Party the record saw the band pulling a full creative 180 by creating the record entirely by hand. Authentically deep and rich in substance, it was a process that let the them to further organically incorporate elements of breakcore, glitch and urbanist jungle in order to authentically depict the existentialist horror of trying to live a fulfilling life in a world of chaos whilst the jaws of the void of the unknown beyond lie in wait. But even with band successfully navigating a drastic change in approach, Overrider still have one final release forthcoming. Releasing September 3rd is Kill -9 Yr Idols, an EP in the form of contrastive and unused material that explores the nature of computer space in relation to natural space and the liminal parallels the two share.
Related: Overrider – The City Eats The Stranger // The Sky Eats The City | Album Review
With the The City Eats The Stranger // The Sky Eats The City out now and Kill -9 Yr Idols releasing this week, we got in touch the band that reject social media to learn more of their unorthodox approach, their creative approach and movements lie behind the digital veil of their design.
“Tired, probably. It’s been sat on a hard drive since maybe the end of March, so it’s good to be getting it out there.”
“The short answer is yes. The longer answer is, it’s easier in some ways, harder in others. Being able to mostly work by bouncing tracks down and assembling everything in a single DAW from pure audio and structured MIDI is much easier to work with, from a practical perspective if nothing else. We always had a hard time previously bridging ideas we’d had in code and recreating them in a DAW. The hard thing this time was being picky about when ideas were developed enough, or needed more work. It can be an endless rabbit hole of tinkering when you can control every parameter. Also, in the end, we learned how to do a bunch more generative stuff in the DAW, but it just didn’t make it onto the album, because it wasn’t the right vibe.”
“Probably. We had a quite strong idea for what the concept of the LP was going to be and where everything slotted into that. There’s a good case for saying that the concept itself is probably a reaction to the last 18 months though. There’s certainly a reaction in the music against the feeling of cabin fever, but those songs were written in the winter, when you’d be feeling a bit like that in the North West of England even if there wasn’t a pandemic on.”
“The increasing jungle influence is very much John’s doing. He hears everything from ideas that die a death, through to demos, through to finished tracks. He’s always said we have a strong jungle influence, and him saying that a few times probably planted the seed that we could lean into the jungle and breakcore stuff a bit more.”
“It’s cool that it comes across that way, as that’s definitely the intention! Music is a great way for communicating emotions that you can’t put into words. That’s true whether you make it with all organic instruments, or all synthetic ones. When we’re working on drum parts with John – which are at this point pretty key to our sound – we usually talk in terms of feelings, and emotions and colours. The technical side of our music is basically just how we get from A to B. If it doesn’t resonate, then it probably wasn’t worth making.”
“In a word, death. It’s about a journey from needing to escape and seek the unknown to being in a position where you’re trying to flee the unknown. It’s sort of a cosmic horror, which became more and more appropriate as the pandemic went on. Both musically, and in the samples, and in the graphic novel there’s all these little cues and motifs that foreshadow and mirror the sweep of the narrative.”
“Working with Alex on a record is something we’ve wanted to do in various bands for nearly a decade. This is the first time we had the release, the concept and the time to make it all work, and we’re stoked about that. We had a sketch of the thread of the narrative, and we wrote the songs to fit that. As soon as we had demos for the whole album, we sent them over and then made a concrete timeline, with notes and visual references and cues, and Alex then went away and wrote a fleshed out version of the story based on the action and themes that we had woven into the tracks. Especially with all the speech samples, there’s a quite unsubtle guiding hand throughout on what you’re supposed to feel, and when. Alex was amazing at taking that blueprint, but also subverting it. At the end of the day, it’s as much Alex’s story as Overrider’s – you have to tell a story in the way that seems creatively resonant to you.”
“We’ve done stuff with Boneface for previous projects and his aesthetic is basically completely in line with what we’re doing. We’re always trying to get a bit more distance from the work, to try and let it stand on its own, in its own world, so doing things like press photos or whatever is hard for us. We wanted some avatars and characters that could live in the world we’d created with Alex – and the wider world of Overrider. He knocked it out of the park. As for where we will take any of this stuff in the future – who can say. It’s weird to think about, but we’ve only been a band for like, eighteen months.”
“It’s probably because of that. Plus what we said before, there’s a desire to remove ourselves from the conversation because it’s boring. Ironic to say that given this is an interview, but there you are. Most of your heroes are quite boring when you meet them at best, or they actively disappoint you at worst. We live in this atomized, online world and overrider’s music is a reflection of that. Not in a superficial way, but in a nuts-and-bolts way. We’re programming music to program computers to, and just like you may not know the real identities behind the avatars you work with on an open source project, so it isn’t that important what the personalities behind the project are. It matters what our output is. Our one concession is Insta, ‘cos it’s so visual, and we spend a lot of time on that side of the project.”
“As we touched on, we did experiment with some generative stuff but it didn’t fit the LP at all. Tonally and even down to note and chord choice the album had rules around it and a flow, we couldn’t shoehorn anything in unless it one-hundred-percent fit. So by the end of the writing and mixing we had a lot of half finished stuff, some of which we really liked. We sent a bunch of it to John and then refined it based on what he thought was worth pursuing. Most of the ideas were generative, and based on his breaks, or parts from our old EPs, alternative stuff from the album, all sorts. It really had this more aggressive, guitar-y, industrial vibe to it, and it felt quite like the re:ntegration material. So we allowed ourselves to use more guitar, to draw on shoegaze and Dillinger Escape Plan and just see where it went.”
“The concept was much more claustrophic; the first riffs we had were bits of what became kill yr idols, crypto)))core and exit1, and we really felt like we wanted to make the concept revolve around physical space, cyberspace, and how the city and inner space of computer runtime are sort of, well, killing us really. Or at least, late stage capitalism is, aided by us, trapped as we are in these closed, boxed-in spaces we can’t control. That sounds quite pretentious, maybe it is, but the tracks are pretty direct, so you can probably enjoy them without needing to go read any books on architecture. Hopefully the concept will be fleshed out a bit more for people by the videos.”
“We have some more stuff in the works, but it’s very early days. We also have an idea for the concept for album two, and we’ll probably work with Alex again on that, depending on time constraints when we get there. Also, presumably gigs will happen again at some point?”