Shinetiac

(This article’s English version was produced with AI-assisted translation)

Anyone who’s even remotely familiar with contemporary ambient-dub, the kind more influenced by IDM than the fumes of Jah, knows that Pontiac Streator and Ben Bondy are among the most acclaimed pioneers: founders of the electronic new wave of the 2020s, the two alchemists boast a catalog of nocturnal hallucinations, synthetic substances translated into underwater synthesizers, hallucinatory excursions where deep meditative states intertwine with crude fantasies, where tactile sensations blend with multisensory experiences. As if that wasn’t enough, the two have cleverly intertwined their mysticism in the Shinetiac project, a trio completed by Shiner, an entity still shrouded in mystery.

"Infiltrating Roku City" is a crystallized nostalgia of the future in fluid ambient-dub codes of urban extraction, where the vaporwave legacy is torn apart according to IDM-downtempo logics, female whispers and manipulations of floating chords ("Whatever With Frutto"), glitched pianos submerged by sonic refuse and digital ashes, in a magma that sinks between tortured autotuned vocal fragments and lullabies scattered in the ether ("I Hate Being Sober"). Released by West Mineral Ltd., a creation of Huerco S., whose catalog has a lethargic aura of a dissolved gospel, where hieroglyphs take shape like a trip on acid loaded on USB drives, "Infiltrating Roku City" is the second chapter of the trio. A work that draws from the individual paths of its members as well as personalities like Ecco2k and Bladee, but crushed by dreampunk injections from Chuck Person’s matrix ("Crisis Angel (Spotify Version)").

Imagine a meeting between the violet nostalgia of Macintosh Plus and a massive dose of anesthetics synthesized by these three shady individuals, a collaboration launched into orbit with an interstellar perspective made of IDM-breakcore and nebulous, supersonic yet expanded rhythms ("Purelink"). The result is an illuminating chaos.
The impression is that the personalities of these twenty-first-century sorcerers are too strong to merge into a truly cohesive entity. Their solo careers can reach moments of ecstatic finesse (Pontiac Streator’s "Triz" is perhaps one of the peaks of recent years), and yet, scattered among bionic voices, celestial mantras, and endless echoes, the result remains a journey that interests. And this is, without much doubt, already a good achievement.

27/04/2025