Thee Koukouvaya announces new album Ancient Race of Techno-Voyagers.
On August 22nd, 2016, Fiercely Independent Records released Ancient Race of Techno-Voyagers, the new album from elusive analog technicians Thee Koukouvaya, in vinyl and digital formats.
Ancient Race of Techno-Voyagers is the second full-length album from collaborators John O’Hara and Brian Wenckebach, following their debut LP This is the Mythology of Modern Death (Saint Marie Records) and their ambient EP Witches’ Jelly (soundinsilence). Magnet Magazine described This is the Mythology of Modern Death as “dark and claustrophobic electronica,” while Penny Black Music hailed the album as “an atmospheric masterpiece” and Stereo Embers Magazine found themselves “mesmerized, ecstatic, and chilled out down to our very marrow” by “an absolute mind-fuck of seductive electronic imagination.”
The nine electronic experiments on Ancient Race of Techno-Voyagers build on the sound established on that first LP, crafting expansive, cinematic narratives out of dense layers of synthesizer melodies and complex electronic percussion, this time around producing even darker, more esoteric results. Though on the whole moodier in tone than the previous album, Ancient Race of Techno-Voyagers still expresses a range of emotions, like the anxious jitter of “Limbic Crisis for Sparkle and Foam” and the cathartic longing of “Margaritas by the Pool,” which includes a vocoder performance by Ulrich Schnauss, one of electronic music's most forward-thinking artists.
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About Thee Koukouvaya
Thee Koukouvaya is the conceptual aural sister city to Vilandredo, Rethymno, on the island of Crete. The group’s architects, based on the East Coast, approach post-rock inflected techno, ambient, and IDM with an eye for depth and structure, assembling crystalline lattices of meticulously programmed drum patterns, frenetically sequenced analog synthesizer rhythms, and luxuriant glacial drones.
Both ominous and celebratory, Thee Koukouvaya engineers inhuman otherworldliness steeped in sci-fi paranoia. The result is a deliberately damaged music, generating a sonic liminal space between the organic and the mechanical.