Combinator gets under your hide with the surreal AI-fuelled video for his industrial-tinged single Guest In Your Own Skin — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
The lead single from the multi-genre musical innovator’s robust new EP re//combinator — due June 17 — Guest In Your Own Skin is the latest one-of-a-kind creation from Combinator mastermind Sean Fairchild, who handles bass, vocals, synth and programming duties. By finding real connections between diverse soundscapes and subgenres, his signature sound pushes the limits of futuristic, heavy, experimental music.
The spirit and ethos of Combinator have always been about oneness, singularity and fusing diverse musical styles into his self-describe “allsound.” While the perennial and foundational elements of progressive music, alternative rock, and drum and bass/jungle continue to be evident on this new release, re//combinator renews the artist’s raucous recipe with flavours of industrial, prog metal, neo-soul and EDM. The new EP will features four originals and three remixes — two from Jesse Holt of ’90s Seattle favourites Second Coming, and one from Chi:Child.
Combinator revels in a backdrop of bittersweet, earworm-friendly and heartstring-tugging harmony, never losing focus of the song or listener — yet manages moments of blinding instrumental virtuosity, pushing the electric bass envelope deeper and further into the acoustic and electronic realms.
Healthy helpings of NIN-like industrial textures folded in with frenetic Squarepusher-esque beat fetishism, a heap of vocoder-drenched emotivity, a couple of pinches of progressive metal, and two fingers of rhythmically intricate funk all combine to produce a diverse but ultimately accessible, future-focused roux for meaty lyrical themes ranging from posthumanism to lighthearted cartoon commentary.
Born abroad and raised in highly disparate locales such as Malaysia, France, China, Japan, and around the U.S., the Emmy-winning, multi-endorsed Fairchild developed an ear for the universally shared qualities of music that would propel him to charge through arbitrary ethnomusicological boundaries threatening to stand in the way of creativity. Settling in Seattle just in time for the city’s alternative heyday, the future sound combiner adopted the freeness of spirit and alt-rock ethos that would serve as the bedrock for his musical musings and explorations.
Combinator melds melodic progressive metal, synth-funk, soulful vocals, and glitchy breakbeat electronica into a dizzying, post-futurist dreamscape. Schizophrenic, yet born of an overall cohesive vision, the results are at once funky and ornate; the auditory distillation of one man’s wildest melodic and harmonic hallucinations.
Watch Guest In Your Own Skin above, pre-save the re//combinator EP HERE, and unlock Combinator‘s secrets at his website, Facbook, Twitter and Instagram.
