GRIDFAILURE & MEGALOPHOBE Release “I Have Friends Up There Redux” Video; Jazz-Inspired Third Collaborative Album, Harbinger Winds, Out Now On Nefarious Industries + New Material In The Works

photos by David Brenner

GRIDFAILURE and MEGALOPHOBE have just issued a video for “I Have Friends Up There Redux,” the song found on the third collaborative album from the two New York experimental solo projects, Harbinger Winds, out now on Nefarious Industries.

Shortly after both acts formed in 2016, GRIDFAILURE’s David Brenner and MEGALOPHOBE’s Benjamin Levitt began recording together and became incredibly close-knit, contributing to each other’s albums, Levitt serving in GRIDFAILURE’s live improv lineup, Brenner creating videos and content for MEGALOPHOBE, and so on. Together they created a collaborative album, Dendritic, which was released in April of 2017, at which time they had already begun collaborating on new material. Their second cooperative release, Tasukete, dropped in October of 2018, but the seed for what would be their third album together was already planted, and the jazz-inspired Harbinger Winds was released in September of 2022.

Harbinger Winds sees Brenner and Levitt performing a wide array of vocals, guitars and basses, keys, synth, drums/percussion, accordion, theremin, cello, harmonica, electronics, tape manipulation, nature recordings, and more, and features a wide array of guest contributors helping shape its direction, including platinum session musician/performer Mac Gollehon (Duran Duran, Chaka Khan, Buddy Rich, David Bowie, Blondie, Onyx), Leila Abdul-Rauf (Vastum, Ionophore), Sally Gates (Titan To Tachyons), Christian Molenaar (Those Darn Gnomes), Morgan Evans (Walking Bombs), Matt Bacon, Rosa Henriquez, Rob Levitt, and Denise Fillion. The fourteen-minute closing title track sees all nine guest collaborators converging with Brenner and Levitt. Harbinger Winds was mastered by Dan Emery at Black Matter Mastering (Kool Keith, Steve Von Till, Thetan) and completed with photography/artwork by Brenner.

“I Have Friends Up There Redux” was initially a MEGALOPHOBE solo track, recorded for an underground radio broadcast, which Levitt brought into the collaborator-rich environment of Harbinger Winds to give the song new life, the song now fitted with a psychedelic video directed by Brenner.

Levitt writes, “The basis for this song was a droning tape loop with some piano played over it that I had recorded as part of a project called The Dark Outside — broadcast to nobody in the middle of a park near where some friends live outside of London, hence the name. When Dave and I started working on this new record, I thought we could revisit the track and see what we could build out of it. What we ended up with far exceeded what I had imagined. After we recorded Dave’s synths and my bass, we started to have something a bit meatier, but it was when we added Rosa Henriquez’ spoken word that this song really became something special: an antinarrative description of dream-logic that echoes and overlaps itself and then dissolves just as the harsh vocals and dissonant lines bubble up and boil over. The track opens with Matt Bacon’s acoustic guitar, we follow the looping noise and piano through Rosa’s monologue into a vortex of distortion and clashing accordion chords, and then after the waves of noise crash and recede, we’re left with that piano and Matt’s guitar as a tenuous connection to where we were before the trip started. It’s a journey that Dave matched perfectly with his psychedelic swirling video. Enjoy!”

Watch GRIDFAILURE & MEGALOPHOBE’s “I Have Friends Up There Redux” video RIGHT HERE.

Harbinger Winds is available as a limited hand-numbered cassette alongside merch and all digital platforms at Nefarious Industries where three prior videos from the album are playing HERE.

Watch for new material from both MEGALOPHOBE and GRIDFAILURE to be released this year, with new updates pending release in the days ahead.

“…makes for a perfect soundtrack to a Lynchian nightmare… – The Sleeping Shaman

“As their previous collaborations have been extraordinarily avantgarde in nature, this one ups the ante in every possible way… GRIDFAILURE and MEGALOPHOBE defy easy categorization with their cinematic approach to harsh noise, avant-jazz, and psychedelic dark ambiance. That much has previously been well established. However, the choice here to focus on the psychedelic cinematic side was an excellent one.” – Nine Circles

“GRIDFAILURE & MEGALOPHOBE are an unusual couple of projects… with Harbinger Winds being their most avant-garde album to date. The first thing to note on Harbinger Winds is that it’s not strictly music in any conventional sense. Rather, it’s an uncertain journey into realms of discontent, all interlinked and yet their own brand of intentionally unpleasant.” – Distorted Sound Magazine