My counter-cultural musical alter-ego.
Since late 2024 I've been working on some more overtly commercial-sounding (pop-dance-electronic) music. The project was born out of a frustration that the 'overton window' (the range of political ideas that are deemed acceptable in mainstream discourse) had shifted so much to the right. The idea was to seed ideas that challenged the neo-liberal hegemony using deliberately accessible pop music as the delivery mechanism. With the calamitous future we are assured by continuing with 'business as usual', the need for counter-action has never been more urgent, but with the mainstream media essentially captured by the right wing, arguments that challenge the status quo are not reaching the people who need to hear it.
'Rebelling against the system' is of course a well established trope in popular music. The intention here is not simply to rebel for the sake of rebellion, but to be more constructive: to put across a more tempered argument peppered with facts in an attempt to catalyse a more critical stance to the world order that people too often accept unthinkingly.
A few people have since commented that "It's not really pop music." Well, it's sounds pretty poppy to me, and borrows/references the musical language, timbres, and production of pop music, even if there are still some quite unconventional things going on.
Dissident Sound Lab's releases (an EP and two singles so far) are available on all the usual streaming platforms – YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Music and more besides.
As I'm trying to target a more mainstream audience I felt obliged to create some promo music videos too, while being quite constrained by budget, skill set, and the fact that I don't want to appear in any of them! Given those constraints, I'm pretty pleased with how they have turned out.