Cry - AD 140

“It’s anything but a lean-back listen, and in a time when so much of electronic music has come to feel both easily digestible and exceedingly polite, there’s something genuinely thrilling about a band that isn’t afraid to march into the club and scream in everyone’s face.”

Relaxer Finds Nourishment in Chaos (and Non-Chaos Too)

“Some artists can be summed up in a sentence, even after decades of activity. It’s not necessarily a bad thing; some of history’s greatest and most influential musicians basically did one thing extremely well, and kept doing it again and again throughout their career. Daniel Martin-McCormick, however, is not one of those artists.”

Black Eyes - Hostile Design

“When Black Eyes reunited in 2023, it felt like a minor miracle. Hostile Design, in turn, is faced with an imposing question: How do you capture chaos in a bottle twice, years removed from the initial energy that fueled it? In typical Black Eyes fashion, they attempt something new.”

Relaxer - Concealer

“It's an album of dance tracks that aren't only designed for the dance floor—they're designed to be held and felt, like the almost grotesque mixed-material sculpture on the cover by Black Dice founder Bjorn Copeland.“

The 10 Best Electronic Albums of 2019 

“From the playfully damaged opener ‘Serpent In The Garden’ to the closing epic ‘Finally Forgetting,’ it’s a near-perfect hour of music that finds McCormick in total control of his craft.”

15 Questions 

“In 1998, I stumbled upon Henry Rollins’ tour diaries from his years in Black Flag in the Tower Records down the street from my school. I sat there for hours reading their display copy mesmerized by these stories of the band travelling around in a van, sleeping on floors, running their own record label, dodging the cops, getting cups of piss thrown on them by punks in England, etc etc. That night I announced I was going to be a musician. I was 14 years old.”

Coconut Grove Review 

7.3
“...at some point, Martin-McCormick stopped being an ex-punk dabbling in electronic music and became a proper techno producer who happens to come from a D.C. post-hardcore background. His music has become subtler along the way, but it has also gotten a lot more rewarding.”

Relaxer: In Conversation

“Years and years ago I had this image of a kind of pulsing purple/green, melting music... I grew up in the Washington DC and in the summers the heat would just bear down on you. Kudzu would grow over everything and the air was thick with pollen. I love that feeling, of things being overwhelmingly alive and a little disgusting.” 

Mutual Dreaming at H0L0

“It was still dark, with the psychedelic head-fuck energy he's so good at, but it was also fast and lean, devoid of any unnecessary elements. He used subtle melodies in a way that felt evocative, but not sentimental.” 

Truancy Volume 173

“At some point in 2014 I saw the word ‘relaxer’ and imagined a very specific image of a patient tied to a bed in a hospital being administered a tranquilizer with a gun-like apparatus. I was thinking a lot about the general state of the world and just noticing there was this weird trend that every product being sold to my generation was soundtracked with some insipid ukelele-and-whistling music. It created this unsettling ambient cultural narrative that we were all sensible cool millennials doing just fine living in some kind of post-Mumford & Sons, farm-to-table Brooklyn utopia. Obviously this is not true.”

Label of the Month: Lovers Rock Recordings

“Imagine it as this hissing jungle at dusk, a space where there's a blurring of boundaries between yourself and the sound.”

Relaxer - Relaxer

4.0
“Relaxer wrings out a slimy, nearly sinister kind of club energy with smeared and unusual synth patterns. These four tracks, diverse and never dull, chase deeper and deeper emotional peaks in the night.“

Ital

“On the most recent Ital record, Dream On, Martin-McCormick seeks to both increase the muscularity of his beats and embrace vacuums of unstructured dissonance... Each unpredictable step seems to polarise, and that’s something we’re happy to encourage.”

Rising: Ital

“The only time I've ever like felt like an insider was in Washington, D.C. I was born there, and I didn't even realize I was an insider until I left.”