Dark electronic from PatternShift

PatternShift is the electronic music project of science fiction author Benjamin Kamphaus. The composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist (but especially keytarist) creates music that teleports you to other worlds.

For the past four years, PatternShift has been releasing sci-fi influenced synthwave music at a variety of lengths and subgenres, including his spacewave albums: Vaskania Prime (2018), Wake of the Wanderer (2019), and Fragments of the Fleet (2020).

Commenting on his music project, he offers, “My musical background is pretty eclectic. I spent a lot of time with an out of the box only mindset. Even doing digital recording, I was working with a Fostex FD-8 and zip discs and was pretty slow to adopt a modern DAW workflow, just moving recording and multi tracking to lightweight software like Audacity. I didn’t program things in, I always played them: live drums, live guitar, live bass and keys. And that’s still mostly true in my current workflow, even if I clean up the midi later. Even four on the floor kick… I’ll play that in on keys or my V drums. I want to feel everything that goes into the song.”

Continuing, “I came to synthwave (or that adjacent space) through a combination of disparate influences. In late high school I was really into the polyrhythmic sound of industrial influenced rock like NIN and Tool, and early progressive rock: King Crimson, ELP, etc. but my big love (like for a lot of other longer, weird musicians) was Radiohead. While I don’t make music that sounds like Radiohead, they had this weird effect on people in my generation where suddenly it was OK to like both prog and punk influenced genres.”

Now the artist brings us the new track “Hypermorphic”, a dark and atmospheric electronic piece full of driving rhythm and piquant synth instrumentation. The new track features cinematic synthwave with cyberpunk, industrial, and IDM elements in the sound design.

Rhythmic hooks right out of the gate, a brief cool down in the bridge, building up to a transformed hook with big cinematic hits resulting in an epic electronic soundscape that demonstrates the artist’s composition abilities as well as production panache.

“The space I work in is a combination of melancholy and aspiration. How do you go from a place of hardship, difficulty, loss… and try to get somewhere better? It’s kind of trite to talk about ‘hope,’ and I think that’s because hope is often unanchored. Like it’s just a belief, the aspiration I’m interested in is working on yourself and your community: emotionally, ethically, technically, creatively. The 80s synthesis sound, as weird as it is to say, taps into all that for me. It was a hugely innovative and forward looking period. I try to start from a dialogue with the sounds of that era and go somewhere new.”

Listen to Hypermorphic below

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