Transistor The Horde

Franck Vigroux and Ben Miller ) launch an alternately scuzzy, convulsive and strung-out new slab as Transistor with the searing electronics and testy vocals of The Horde - coming strongly recommended to fans of Mika Vainio’s hook-ups with Alan Vega or Alva Noto’s meeting with Iggy Pop.

The duo was forged when Vigroux and Miller’s paths crossed in NYC, 2009, discovering a mutual sore point intersecting the former’s harsh and clinically sharp electronics with the latter’s husky lead vocals. Subsequent live shows involved a string of destroyed PA’s and led to a pair of LPs released on Vigroux’s D’Autres Cordes label, Transistor [2012] and The Din Of Eon [2013].

Fast forward to 2017 and they’ve remerged around the kinetic locus of The Horde, which perhaps uncannily arrives in the wake of stage left exits by the mighty Mika Vainio and Alan Vega, respectively in the last year. And that’s high praise, as The Horde clearly reprises the power of that late, great VVV pairing with Ilpo Väisänen in the A-side’s crush of electric squall, bommyknocker beats and snarling vox, whereas The Horde proper telescopes out to an aerial view of the city, perched like a observant, poetic engel over sprawling sci-fi electronics and clouds of noctilucent ambient pollution.