Collapsing Scenery

Collapsing Scenery is the meeting of two fertile and febrile minds, Don De Vore and Reggie Debris. Together they straddle the gap between the music, art, film and politics, seamlessly moving between each with the same ease at which they traverse the globe, soaking up experiences and immersing themselves in different cultures
Since they formed in 2013 “under a pall of paranoia and disgust” they haven’t stopped moving. A conversation with them recalls stories of recently recording a ‘goth-dancehall’ track in Jamaica with Ninjaman, sailing their soundsystem into Britain for a series of shows, visiting occupied territories in Palestine on fact-finding missions, recording their debut album on a remote ranch in Texas and soaking up rays in Corsica – and that’s in the first five minutes.
Debut album Stress Positions is a glorious collision of futurist electro, glacial goth tones, techno, post-punk and chillwave recorded using analogue electronics: samplers, step sequencers, synths and drum machines. Aesthetically it initially recalls the early pioneering synth-punk of bands such as Human League, Screamers and The Normal, when the most forwarding thinking punks looked to the twenty-first century. Dig deeper however and it reveals an articulate and highly politicised collection that’s far from mired being in nostalgia for the recent past. Quite the opposite: Stress Positions is a forward-looking album with strong state-of-the-world lyrical content. In the tradition of so many defining electro duos – whether Suicide, Pet Shop Boys or Underworld – Collapsing Scenery’s architecture is entirely of their own creation. They’ve built their own world and live in it. All are welcome.
In a genre often lacking in lyrical bite, theirs is electro music with meaning and purpose. It flexes the head as well as the heart. Take the taut post-punk electro of single ‘Metaphysical Cops’, which draws inspiration from by journalist Jeff Sharlet’s expose of the American roots of Uganda’s anti-gay movement in a 2010 article in Harper’s magazine. It considers the very real consequences of invidious and extremist American ideologies which, struggling to find a foot-hold at home, are transplanted into new territories. The title references a quote from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pnin: “metaphysical police can break physical bones”. For reasons not fully understood, the track was recorded on a ranch in rural Texas in complete darkness, while wearing military issue night-vision goggles.
“They fuck you up, your king and country,” sings Debris elsewhere on the throbbing electro tune ‘Angkar’, which manages the rare feat of recalling both the poetry of Phillip Larkin and the aggro-punk workouts of Suicide and Alan Vega’s solo work, cult 90s synth punks Brainiac or perhaps Scott Walker’s recent recordings. The phrase “Angkar kills but does not explain” was used in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge to describe the senselessness of perpetuated brutality and murder. ‘Sisyphus Of Negev’ offers a black-hearted digi-ballad, an electro protest song, lament and tribute for the villagers of Al-Arakib, an unrecognized Bedouin Arab village in the Negev desert in Israel. “The villagers, citizens of Israel, have been subjected to the demolition of their century-old village ninety times since 2010,” explains Debris. “The state is attempting to forcibly relocate them to a modern township. The villagers refuse to leave, and after each demolition rebuild their village in increasingly make shift structures and tents.”
Other songs explore parallels between today’s fundamentalist terror cells with left-leaning predecessors such as Red Army Faction and Red Brigades, the incompetence, and moral evil of the CIA, “the dangers of entering into quid pro quo relations with highly dubious partners, the frustrations of activism, the racism of urban development and the walling off of the wealthy from their poorer neighbours.”
Collapsing Scenery’s inception can be traced back several years when New York-based artist/musician Don De Vore and musician friend and LA resident Reggie Debris collaborated in programming events with D’agostino and Fiore gallery on the Lower East Side, beginning with a video installation which lead to a month of music and visual programming called ‘Rebuild Babylon’ which in turn evolved into a travelling residency series.
Out of this came Collapsing Scenery, the musical wing of their collaboration. Don De Vore is a mainstay of some of the US’s most exciting and important contemporary bands, having played in Ink & Dagger, The Icarus Line, Amazing Baby, Giant Drag, Sick Feeling, Souls She Said and Lilys. He is also curator Brooklyn arts space Trans Pecos. Joining him on vocals is debuting vocalist and lyrical collaborator Reggie Debris, a veritable human riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
The pair exist to challenge and subvert perceptions in the worlds of outsider art and political protest. And have a great time while doing it. A more recent 2016 artistic residency in New York saw Collapsing Scenery create a psychedelic immersive art installation that incorporated projections, layers of colourful plexi-glass, a reading from Genesis P-Orridge and a performances from De Vore and Debris (meanwhile in a clash of the old and new the gallery upstairs hosted a Picasso exhibition).
While some bands claim to be exponents of the DIY ethic, Collapsing Scenery are entirely self-sufficient, sonic buccaneers sailing the seas with piratical intent. “Playing in a traditional rock venue in any given city is my idea of hell,” says Debris. “We want to play in basements, warehouses, garages - and travelling with our own sound-system, power supply and visuals, that’s exactly what we do. Not being beholden to club, promoters or the existing way of doing things is important. We’re 100% self-contained.”
Early single ‘Deep State’ has been described as “a throbbing slab of fuzzed-out drone-funk that’s in the same orbit as, say, early-’90s hip-hop-influenced Sonic Youth” while a clutch of recent debut shows in London and Paris saw what De Vore calls “the stoking of fires for our grand plan, an instigating of new ideas.”
Meanwhile a deluge of creative activity is spurting down the pipeline: new Collapsing Scenery remixes are incoming from Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux and The Big Pink, while the duo have turned their hands to Two Door Cinema Club’s new single. High-ranking photographers and video-makers such as Richard Kern are lining up to work with them, and the results of their aforementioned sessions in Jamaica will receive a future release.
Collapsing Scenery offer a new vision for how a modern band can be. They’re not even a band – they’re curators of a series of planet-planning events, expressions, exhibitions, albums, installations, journeys, adventures and parties, all operating outside of the confines of the tired traditional industry. “We both like to experience things first hand,” says Debris. “How can you truly comment on, say, the Israel-Palestine conflict unless you go out and talk to people there? We like to go to new places and put boots on the ground to speak.
“Travel makes the word smaller and is essential to expanding the creative mind,” adds De Vore.
Collapsing Scenery are artistic explorers pushing into bold new futures, then. Join them.