Various Artists: Digital Wings 1
- Xorcist - Bad Mojo II
- Scar Tissue - Powerclone
- Xenon - Ygrene Citenik
- Seofon - 5-Space
- Retina - Exorcised
- Insight 23 - Disease
- Out of Band Experience - Sample This
- Gridlock - Sickness
- Institute of Technology - Smartbeets
- The Bleeding Stone - Shattered Belief
- Never - Incinerating Lucidity
- Intercepted Alien Transmission - (Off Shortwave Radio)
- Xenon - Icon Jazz
While "Digital Wings" was originally intended to be released back in 1996,
to partially fund the Cyberden BBS, it took over two years and temporary
downtime for the legendary Bay Area on-line musical forum before it finally
became available. In this massive amount of time, bands like Scar Tissue and
Gridlock obtain record deals and volumes of positive press, Xorcist went on to
release a new single and full length album, and Insight 23 successfully toured
the country, only to disappear into obscurity with their record label imploded
from debt. Nevertheless, Digital Wings was well worth the wait. Most of the
bands, by default, happened to originate in the Bay Area and converge on the
ambient and experimental genres with reckless abandon. Bands like Bleeding
Stone, Scar Tissue and Gridlock all work with minimalism and abstract percussion
to create oddly invigorating beat structures underneath their noisy exterior.
Xenon, Never, and Seofon prefer to work with complex ambient arrangements that
flow around silence, while Insight 23, Retina, and Institute of Technology
utilize a more standard array of Coldwave, Electro, and Trip-Hop to assault the
senses of their fans. "Digital Wings" certainly is diverse in its assortment of
artists, maintaining the quality we have come to expect from The Cyberden, which
is no less than impressive considering that it was released on a non-existent
budget.
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