Rubbernecking In Vertigo

Rubbernecking In Vertigo marks Elon Katz's fifth studio album, and the second album under his birth name. The musical artist got his start at age 20 in Chicago with the weirdo EBM project White Car, before relocating to his home state of California and settling in Los Angeles. As an artist on Hippos In Tanks, he helped shape the label's influential attitude on pop-forward electronic music experimentalism alongside the likes of Hype Williams, Gatekeeper, and Laurel Halo. With the Streetwalker collaboration, Elon and Beau Wanzer (Chicago, L.I.E.S.) made a widely-played Cititrax album that accompanied performances in NY, SF and Chicago. In 2016 he released a solo debut on Powell's Diagonal label and toured the southern US. In 2017 Katz brought his focus to the Zero Grow project (debuting with a Blowing Up The Workshop mix) as well as the homonymous label, with a number of full length releases and EPs for both. 2019 marked the first album of the spelt-out E L O N moniker on San Francisco label Left Hand Path, and a well-regarded EP followed in 2021. This year, Elon assisted with production on the debut solo full-length from Taylor E Burch (Downwards, Tropic Of Cancer). Rubbernecking In Vertigo is a brazen album of introspective vocals and electronics slowly crafted and fermented throughout the seven-year period since The Human Pet (Diagonal, 2016). Across ten songs Elon Katz performs a synthesis of genres - pulling from art-rock, electronica, industrial and avant garde musics - marrying singer-songwriter tendencies with sonic experimentalism and cynical wit. Lyrical songs swirl around obtuse digital timbres, anchoring low-end and scratchy rhythms while featuring string instruments like cello, fretless bass and electric guitar; blending it into a discombobulating context, mixing the electronic idiolect of Elon's work with the artist's early influence of weird Californian music from The Residents' Ralph Records anti-pop, to Mr. Bungle's metal-concrète tomfoolery, and Beck's trip-hop folk. On Rubbernecking In Vertigo, words and voice are the main focus, relying less on mutant processing, instead using the electronic foundations of the music as a soapbox. Teetering in between sincerity and satire, the album's content is hyperreal and droll, musing about the place where psyche collides with the whims of culture and technology. Themes of cultural-stagflation are illuminated through images of patriotism as counterculture, fornicating like a franchise, securitizing one's ego and the accumulation of zeros; digesting the perplexing current epoch with Katz's signature paranoid drama and skeptical absurdity. RIYL - The Residents/Ralph Records, Uwe Schmidt, 90s Beck, James Ferraro, Fever Ray/The Knife, OTTO, Inga Copeland, Mike Patton/Mr. Bungle