Like master painters exploring a subject over a lifetime’s work, Kevin Martin and Dylan Carlson – The Bug and Earth, respectively – have each been mining and defining their genres for more than 20 years. They’re united by an interest in – really an obsession with – heaviness. They search for, examine and break the boundaries between beautiful and ugly, minimal and maximal, light and dark – but The Bug and Earth always make music that is heavy in the most thrilling of ways. Concrete Desert is their latest collaborative work, out March 24 on Ninja Tune via Inertia Music and to celebrate, today, they have dropped the first single off the forthcoming album, “Snakes vs Rats”.
Ninja Tune asked The Bug and Dylan Carlson to perform live in LA around the label’s 25th anniversary, and Martin and Carlson took the opportunity to further the recording project in person. So The Bug vs Earth project holed up in Daddy Kev’s legendary LA studio, with DJ Nobody engineering, for two very long days. Those recording sessions have resulted in the masterpiece that is Concrete Desert. Inspired by J.G. Ballard’s urban dystopias, and the Californian dream capital’s sordid, fragmented underbelly, Martin says that the album is in some ways a Los Angeles-set companion piece to London Zoo.
You can listen to ‘Snakes vs Rats’ below;
