Separated by 7,000 miles, Routine Death is the husband and wife duo of Lisa (Gothenburg) and Dustin Zozaya (Austin), the latter also playing in Texas psych-pop outfit Holy Wave. On May 25th, Fuzz Club and Black Hair Records will be releasing the project’s debut album Parallel Universes. Today, we’re pleased to bring you the premiere of their album in full.
Despite their distance, the duo has a quite unique bound and intimacy. Their creative process involves constantly sending tracks back and forth over the internet and they use cheap equipment, such as a five dollar drum machine iPhone app and decrepit barely-salvageable synths. The result is their impressive debut album, Parallel Universes, a collection of ten tracks that gives us a mesmerizing and minimalist dark and lo-fi noise-pop dark tunes.
Listen to Parallel Universes below:
Elaborating on how exactly their creative process works, Dustin cites an unlikely influence in Wu-Tangs’ RZA: “What happens is I write stuff and I send it to Lisa over WeTransfer. She sings over it, sends it back to me and then I tweak the song according to her vocal parts. RZA from Wu-Tang Clan was actually a big influence. I was reading this book that he wrote and what he would do was he’d make this basic beat and then he’d have all the members of Wu-Tang come in and rap on it. Then he would sit there, listen to it and cut it apart and move everything around. So, that way the vocals aren’t just a layer on top, it’s another ingredient.”
Limitations are an integral part of the Routine Death ethos but not just in geographical terms, the lo-fi minimalism they exhibit coming down to the use of cheap equipment. As Dustin explains: “It sounds like really, really cheap gear. I make a lot of the beats on my phone on this little five dollar programme I have, I just put delay on it and run it through an amp. I also use this organ I found in the practice space, it’s totally wrecked. There’s a lot of that shit going on. I’ve started to learn a lot more out of it. It forces me to be creative.”
Parallel Universes is out on May 25th on Fuzz Club and Black Hair Records. Pre-order it here.