Collapsing Scenery at Home Sweet Home

Through the early 2000s, Pennsylvania-born and New York City-based Don Devore played in many local bands, including punk rockers the Icarus Line, indie guitar band the Lilys, rockers Amazing Baby, theatrical band Ink & Dagger, and electronic group Historics; he is also a curator for the Brooklyn arts space Trans Pecos. Texas native and Los Angeles resident Reggie Debris doubles as Mickey Madden, bassist for Maroon 5. They met in Los Angeles and reconnected in London while each was touring. In 2013, the two musicians started a new band, Collapsing Scenery, with a goal of casting aside the stringed instruments on which they had first learned to play music and on which they were comfortable and versed. Instead, they assembled an array of analog electronics -- samplers, step sequencers, synths and drum machines -- all supplemented by effects pedals. It did not mean they were not going to abandon traditional instruments; it meant they were going to create untraditional music. Collapsing Scenery performed at art installations and underground clubs, and recorded music independently. Collapsing Scenery will release its debut album, Stress Positions, on June 28, 2019.

Collapsing Scenery celebrated the announcement of its pending album release with a free performance tonight at Home Sweet Home. Debris as vocalist and Devore as multi-instrumentalist, along with a drummer, Ryan Rapsys, crossed the lines of futurist electro, goth, industrial, techno, post-punk, chillwave and darkwave with haunting vocals and a hard pulsing beat. Abrasive, aggressive and jolting, the performance seemed to border the fine line between sanity and insanity, with Devore ranting on social injustices as Debris challenged the listener with a mix of conflictingly coarse and meditative soundscapes. Collapsing Scenery has built on the sounds pioneered by Suicide, Swans, and Sonic Youth in the 1980s and taken them one more step further over the edge for some creative and engaging experiments in noise rock.