Photo by Shang Whaley 

GHÖSH is a disco cabal, a “political party” if you dig what we're saying, a band-- they're a wild sonic collage, a quasi post-grunge, post-industrial mash-up, all wrapped up in the chaos and entropic funk of a warped and screwed Public Enemy demo tape and a fax machine shredded in a Cuisinart. Their songs are an iridescent kind of noisy digital alchemy layered in dense charging breakbeats and splattered in raucous dayglo, laser-beamed transmissions from the future at the last protest march of the revolution. 

Symphony Spell (vocals/lyrics) and Zachary Fairbrother (various instruments/samplers), the two cyborgs that form GHÖSH, bonded over their love for jungle, techno, rap and nu metal to create songs that bang in tantric visions of sight and sound. Their aesthetic is ripped from the screenshots of Republican nightmares and projected wide in shimmering hologram, scored by the last dancefloor clearing sound blasts from a party on Cybertron, all couched in the lyrical intensity of a 2008 myspace page co-owned by Audre Lorde and Missy Elliot.

On ALIEN NATION, the group's new EP for Get Better Records, GHÖSH bangs out five anthemic bursts of anti-government, pro-hoe kinesis. In a world ravaged by systemic racism, errant and unchecked capitalism, anti-queer sentiment and police brutality, GHÖSH posits that “all our friends are terrorists” with the same chromatic energy they flex for butt moving and body grooving. Underlying all the gay-os, from “Slammafied Buddhafied Funk”'s Jock Jams riffs and Blade Runner-y synthlines, to “I Wanna Rock”'s robotic AC/DC meets HBCU-drumline backbeat-- is a deliberate, immersive approach to song writing; every noise, every bleep and bloop is a cognitive, talismanic choice, every sample a guiding mantra, woven into a shambolic web with punk rock ferocity. Though their approach is unorthodox, on ALIEN NATION GHÖSH ultimately asks the age old question: Do you wanna rock? In twelve minutes the answer is wildly, emphatically, affirmed. - Alex Smith