Sympathies is a series of self-published releases by Furtive, showcasing an extensive catalog of production. The fourth installment has Furtive exploring new ground and re-focusing familiar high-impact approaches, yielding a 9-track release of scintillating drum’n’bass, driving psychedelic techno, and tuff dancefloor weapons.

The steady, driving techno brain-melter of Contre-Jour launches the release, setting the stage with dizzying lost-in-space arpeggiation and progessive, growling bass mutations. [Faltering] Ego Integrity continues wriggling down the wormhole, with dubbed-out psychedelic washes spilling off of warping synth contortions.

With Wicked Threshold, Furtive introduces a new direction: a thoroughly personal take on crepuscular, phantasmic drum’n’bass. With a gauzy melodic cloud, the track snatches the imagination and pulls the body along with it, tumbling through breakbeat atmospherics. Untroubled Moment is a gentle but energetic drum’n’ bass roller, with playful melodics and fuzzy-crunchy textures to lend that wiggly bounce back to relieved-unclenching-comedown sighs. The fluttering, heartfelt Felicity rounds out the drum’n’bass cuts with warm sunset glitters. With powerful low-end energy and heart-tugging sound design, Furtive lends a buoyant gloss to this release with these three tracks.

True to form, Furtive delivers several more uncompromising pedal-mashers. Kinzhal opens with a full-tilt distorted sonic assault, its thrumming bass matching up with venomous, atonal synth licks to make for a proper beatdown of a track with all of its screws turned tight. Voltaic Kisses is a grinding, bubbling, pounding track for awkward, electrified dancefloor exchanges of saliva n’ substances. Vindicator sweeps the floor with seething, serrated sound design - an unrelenting, cranked-up weapon for frothing dancefloors.

Furtive closes the album out an atmospheric curveball: Digital Detritus is a wistful, plaintive reverie about the weird, touching, heavy, and often unexpected debris discovered in forgotten folders on nearly-lost USB sticks, fizzled hard drives, and almost-disabled accounts - a love note to finding unedited photos and breakup letters in digital hidey-holes almost lost to data oblivion, draft boxes, and/or faulty memory. Furtive weaves a moving soundscape with a yearning keyboard melody and lush, emotive sound design, tapping into the dissociated poignancy of sad boys/drain/internet aesthetics, as well as with a backward glance at Furtive’s long-ago experimental metal/witch house crossover project, Lavender Colored Life.

Sympathies is named after a series of portraits, experimental photographs, and weird VHS footage incidentally produced during a wild, debauched studio session.

Sympathies is a blur of emotions, experiences, sensations, relationships, and the psychedelic fragments between. 
credits
released October 1, 2020

EP artwork by Furtive
Production, mixing, mastering, etc by Furtive

buy here

Sympathies IV

Sympathies is a series of self-published releases by Furtive, showcasing an extensive genre-agnostic catalog of colorful original production. The fifth release in the series has the polychromatic producer revisiting and re-tuning their familiar psychedelic murk, making forays into exquisite and sappy new territory, and - inevitably - delivering fearsome acid. Enclosed are nine tracks of kinetic low-end energy, trippy textures, soaring n’ dreamy moments, and crunchy tuff stuff - all for maximum dancefloor wiggliness.

https://furtivetrax.bandcamp.com/album/sympathies-v

Plunging straight in with shifting propulsive bass movement is Repudiation: a crowning highlight of rippling acid arpeggiation, this track is for when sincerity and gentle dancefloor drama don’t have to come at the expense of high-impact techno kinetics.

The dripping Dendrobatid lowers us into familiar Furtive territory - murky, warping, trippy textures. Dendrobatid is a steamier rendition of this sound, with chunky percussion and leafy breakbeats between the moist, twisting sound design. Profligate submerges us in louring, uneasy warped textures that churn up into slippery, dubbed-out cascades, as the slightly more upbeat Scofflaw pulls us through oil-slicked whirlpool wetness. Both of these trippy, dissociated tracks share sharp, frothy percussive accents, low-slung and steadily progressing synthoid patterns, and a sure case of lost-in-the-fog stumbling.

Furtive fires off a proper fracas with the punishing Pit Dragon and cimmerian Brandstifter. A ferocious fizzed-out acid scorcher, Pit Dragon is a start-to-finish intense fire-breather of a track for high-yield dancefloor detonation. With heavy kicks and slugging bass, Brandstifter has similar intensity, but opts for benthic black-out drum’n’bass sound design of dubbed-out claps, simmering rolling percussion, and uneasy flickers.

For needed levity, Potion Slurper is a somewhat silly sliding bin-rattler for sleepy steppers - either for those still snoozy in the early bits of a night, or for those swirling in the drain in the soporific last morning minutes, once the potions have all been slurped and burped away.

With Gerbera and Dawnpeel, Furtive ventures into the more melodramatic and melodic side of romantic deep techno, weaving soaring, glittering synthesizer movement between heartbeat basses. Gerbera balances the psychedelic with the saccharine, including a warping mycelial overtone texture alongside gossamer pads, while Dawnpeel leans into a glowing, all-smiles warmth for more tender dancefloor moments.

Sympathies is named after a series of portraits, experimental photographs, and weird VHS footage incidentally produced during a wild, debauched studio session - an experience long-since surpassed with all-the-more saturated and riotous adventures.

Sympathies is a blur of emotions, experiences, sensations, relationships, and the psychedelic fragments between. 
credits
releases March 8, 2021

Album art and text by Furtive
Production, mixing, mastering, cheeky grand-standing, etc by Furtive

Snag it on Bandcamp

Sympathies V

Sympathies is a series of self-published releases by Furtive, showcasing an extensive multi-genre catalog of colorful and exploratory original production. The sixth album in the sequence wades steadily into foggy, crepuscular melodrama, delivering 11 tracks of steamy sound design for dilated pupils, sweaty lurching, and locked-in dancefloor worship. This release is primarily rooted in dripping, murky techno, but Furtive slips in a few billowing ambient moments for wide-eyed infinite split-seconds. 

The unearthly and impellent flagship track of Sympathies VI is The Night Wanderer, an electrifying, nearly sinister psychedelic techno weapon. There’s an uncanny, spine-shivering energy to this track: it grips the listener and propels them along as if possessed. Eerie, haunting, and maniacally energizing, this is a track for the electric insomniac with eyes torn wide open by the relentless bumps in the night. 

The next tracks are at once steady and uneasy, hypnotizing and unnerving, propulsive and paralyzing. Both Curse Processor and Breathless are full-blown foggy freakouts for the ravers lost in the swelling, humid clouds of unrelenting club throbbing. The former takes a more frenetic and pointilistic approach along with razor-sharp, clattering percussive sound design to keep you on your toes, while the latter hangs more subtly, glowering like a damp, red bulb above a dancefloor as bodies pulse in suspended animation. Humid Creeper follows in a similar gloomy vein, with a more wound-up and sweaty grinding machine-funk sound as billowing atmospherics roll like fog from plodding, sweltering 909s. 

A sludgy, slippery wound-up acid bomb, Carbonated Jungle might oddly be the funkiest track of this release. A slow, lumbering squelcher, this track lurches and builds with just the right cadence to bring a synchronized, irresistible bounce into shoulder-to-shoulder crowds. It peaks with a woozy interruption, the split second for ravers to glance around before feet and floor flex in unison once more - a moist, spun-out ecosystem.

Memory Canopy/Nighttime Ceilings is a wide-eyed, cinematic ambient experience. This is for sleepless reflections, silent teardrops, pensive awe, profound sighs, scanning lights between trees, for the dawn moments on unexpected sheets when words trail off, for [pagan river crossings]. 

A dusky stepper, Silicone & Scattered Wings re-animates with the bass-weight of an irregular rhythm, soaring and glowing synthesizer warmth, and percussive flutters that are like a comforting, sonic blanket stretched between speaker stacks.

Embrace is a glossy, deceptively intense ambient experience for holding on tightly as the weightless, slow-motion G-force of shifting sound waves and overwhelming, high-voltage psychedelia hurtle you into the glimmers of the night.

Caffeine Eyelashes brings a twinkling levity to the arrangement, with plinking and flowery deep techno-adjacent sound design, gentle atmospheres, and with no particular hurry to its sauntering pace - it’s the sunny meadow stroll in an otherwise thorny twilight bramble-bounce of a release.

Seeking Brighter immediately ticks up the urgency, but without undue alarm. Pointillistic arpeggios play counter to hazy, woozy see-sawing sequences in a curious, exploratory, and perpetually enticing way, pulling the listener along as mental soundscapes and physical soundwaves rise and fall. Epiphanies in Dreams’ similar irregular teetering arpeggiation is coupled with blurred, winding, ephemeral slipperiness - it’s the sonic texture of the specifics slipping through the fingers of comprehension and memory upon waking from particularly tumbling, tossing, and turning dream-states. 

Sympathies is named after a debauched steamy summertime studio session - long-since surpassed with all-the-more riotous adventures, brighter lights, and unexpected plot twists.

Production, Mixing, and Mastering by Furtive
Words and artwork by Furtive

Available on Bandcamp

Furtive - Sympathies VI

Mixes

Production

Furtive's super-saturated genre-mashing set from the SEQUENCE Four Year Anniversary stream. This set zips through pointillist techno hypnotics, drum'n'bass wigglers, tongue-in-cheek pop-club deconstructions, neo-rave pedal-pushers, and cryptic ambient book-ends. One hell of a journey. 

Recorded in August 2020 during pandemic swelter, this set was played at the last event organized by SEQUENCE in an important warehouse venue formerly vital to DC's underground. While SEQUENCE and this same warehouse may have been laid to rest, the energy of the events and the memories of foggy warehouse experiences will live with us forever.

Video version: https://youtu.be/SBffAuGMI_E

Tracklist:
Donato Dozzy & Mike Parker - Meltemi
MRTRY - Tether Tight
DJH - Overtaken
Aho Ssan - Simulacrum I
Lensk - Seen it all
Cocktail Party Effect - Projects 32
Peder Mannerfelt - Un-Air
Private Caller - Bruzer (Fever AM)
Militiā - Desire
HDMIRROR - Total
FUERR - Niglo
Sramaana - Lost Civilizations (Webuildmachines)
Joe Craven - Shame
Soreab & Loris Rzo - Bait
Sepehr - Party at Heaven's Gate
Famitsu - Tower of Barbs (Hyperboloid Records)
Blicz - Glamorous
Kander - Absence
Fran Navaez - Neoforms
William Arist - Quintaesencia II
Jeroen Search - Reduced External Awareness
Refracted - 579
Saurio - Unnamed Y (Hxagrm Records)
TWR72 - Lucid (Psyk Remix)
DJ Saint Pierre - Clouds Part 4
Z.I.P.P.O. - Space Time
Tensal - Achievement 1
Nicolas Certina - Suma De Azares
Gareth Wild - Patna
Xono & Flaws - The London Sound (Warok Music)
Dold - Revolution
Tadeo & Developer - Speaking Aliens (Captain Cosmotic's Drive to Mars edit)
TonalTheory - A Beautiful World
Furtive - ProxXxima
Deepak Sharma - Psychosis
Auspex - Laceration
Furtive - Crossfire (Format Recordings)
Uun - The Adversary
9beats - Interstellar Dust (Illegal Alien Records)
Lišaj - Hartaa (Genot Centre)
Aho Ssan - Simulacrum I

Furtive - Live at SEQUENCE (Year Four)

Starry-eyed selectors Lychee and Furtive undertook a gelatinous joint adventure of wiggly, sparkly genre-jumping astral exploration at Astrobounce #2. Recorded live from the dancefloor in July 2021, this 4-hour b2b set is a luxurious layout of genres, ass-shaking rhythms, and romantic effervescence - a rambunctious rave run-through for melting hearts and brains into smiling, summertime goo. Plug in and let loose. 

Read more about Astrobounce #2 here: https://ra.co/events/1448569 

Lychee is a thoughtful, bubbly raveworld fixture. A colorful and perpetually exploratory DJ and event organizer, they manifest underground energy with a magical, scintillating take on technoid psychedelia and relentless, meaningful inquiry. Lychee elegantly runs Spontaneous Affinity, a monthly mix and interview series, annual zine, and occasional event platform. A voracious reader and writer, they ever-thoughtfully explore human experience and interconnectedness through words, soundwaves, and the expansive, wobbling pulse of the dancefloor. 

Furtive is a starry-eyed, polychromatic rave conjurer. As a relentless creative tinkerer and underground grand-stander, they have come up in DC’s scene as a prolific, multivariate producer, genre-bending DJ, and underground event organizer. Beyond the bass bins and strobe lights, Furtive is a visual artist and gooey, heartfelt conceptual explorer.

Lychee b2b Furtive - Live at Astrobounce #2 - July 3 2021

Epiphanies in Dreams’ similar irregular teetering arpeggiation is coupled with blurred, winding, ephemeral slipperiness - it’s the sonic texture of the specifics slipping through the fingers of comprehension and memory upon waking from particularly tumbling, tossing, and turning dream-states.

Epiphanies In Dreams

Caffeine Eyelashes

Humid Creeper follows sits in a hypnotic, dusky, somewhat gloomy vein, with a more wound-up and sweaty grinding machine-funk sound as billowing atmospherics roll like fog from plodding, sweltering 909s.

Humid Creeper (Steamy Shadows)

Embrace is a glossy, deceptively intense ambient experience for holding on tightly as the weightless, slow-motion G-force of shifting sound waves and overwhelming, high-voltage psychedelia has you hurtling into the glimmers of the night.

Embrace

Seeking Brighter immediately ticks up the urgency, but without undue alarm. Pointillistic arpeggios play counter to hazy, woozy see-sawing sequences in a curious, exploratory, and perpetually enticing way, pulling the listener along as mental soundscapes and physical soundwaves rise and fall. Epiphanies in Dreams’ similar irregular teetering arpeggiation is coupled with blurred, winding, ephemeral slipperiness - it’s the sonic texture of the specifics slipping through the fingers of comprehension and memory upon waking from particularly tumbling, tossing, and turning dream-states.

Seeking Brighter

Breathless is a full-blown foggy freakout for the ravers lost in the swelling, humid clouds of unrelenting club throbbing, hanging subtly and glowering like a damp, red bulb above a dancefloor as bodies pulse in suspended animation

Breathless

Memory Canopy/Nighttime Ceilings is a wide-eyed, cinematic ambient experience. This is for sleepless reflections, silent teardrops, pensive awe, profound sighs, scanning lights between trees, for the dawn moments on unexpected sheets when words trail off, for [pagan river crossings].

Memory Canopy/Nighttime Ceiling

A sludgy, slippery tightly wound acid bomb, Carbonated Jungle might oddly be the funkiest track of this release. A slow, lumbering squelcher, this track lurches and builds with just the right cadence to bring a synchronized, irresistible bounce into shoulder-to-shoulder crowds. It peaks with a woozy interruption, the split second for ravers to glance around before feet and floor flex in unison once more - a moist, spun-out ecosystem.

Carbonated Jungle

Curse Processor

The unearthly and impellent flagship track of Sympathies VI is The Night Wanderer, an electrifying, nearly sinister psychedelic techno weapon. There’s an uncanny, spine-shivering energy to this track: it grips the listener and propels them along as if possessed. Eerie, haunting, and maniacally energizing, this is a track for the electric insomniac with eyes torn wide open by the relentless bumps in the night.

The Night Wanderer

Furtive is a full-gonzo polychromatic rave conjurer and relentless creative tinkerer. A Philadelphia-based producer, DJ, and occasional event organizer with over a decade of experience in the studio, Furtive's production wizardry has allowed them to land releases on a variety of US and overseas labels, along with a slew of tracks on VA compilations and dozens of self-released cuts. Furtive’s body of work comprises psychedelic warphole-diving techno, quirky and muscular electro, acerbic acid tracks, crooked bass bits, moving ambient atmospheres, and drum & bass bin-rattlers. Furtive cut their teeth as a DJ and promoter in Washington, DC’s warehouses, where they also played a turnkey role in putting on some of the District’s zaniest techno parties. As a DJ, they’ve supported internationally celebrated no-nonsense acts and held court in dingy local watering holes - always with eclectic selections and a steadfast focus on pacing and dynamics, regularly jumping genres to build moving and impactful sets. Beyond the fog and strobe lights, Furtive creates art in a variety of mediums, including linocuts, render art, inky drawings, and occasionally tattooing.

Notes on the Mix ///
"This mix is sparkly, fun, and a little wild, progressing from warm and uplifting sun-shiney booty shakers to clattering stompers and rounded out with some glossy melodrama. I initially wanted to stay rooted in light-hearted, bright, and wiggly material to warm up recent winter doldrums, but I absolutely had to throw in a few fun, slightly unhinged curveballs to keep things spicy and to make you laugh and yearn."

SOCIALS:
@furtivetrax
https://furtivetrax.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/furtive.sasha/
https://ra.co/dj/furtive

XOXA Blend 088 - FURTIVE

Buy on Bandcamp

A2. Strobe Bubble Romance (CLIP)

A1. Tephra (CLIP)

Recorded set for Italian radio outfit Radio Raheem, spanning genres from psychedelic drum & bass, pummeling rave ragers, and abstract ambiance. Originally broadcast on March 7, 2022. 

Radio Raheem archives:
https://www.radioraheem.it/shows/furtive/
https://www.mixcloud.com/radioraheem_milano/furtive-07-03-2022/

Radio Raheem Milano - Furtive - March 7, 2022

Furtive - Wormhole Delivery Service

The Brvtalist is pleased to premiere a new track from Furtive. "Tephra" comes off the Philadelphia-based rave act's forthcoming 12" release of the same name on Brooklyn's Mild Fantasy. The EP blasts off  with explosive energy and today we premiere the thunderous and mesmerizing title track. 

Tephra is 4 original and 1 digital bonus out March 17th on Mild Fantasy. 

Pick up the vinyl and digital at: https://mildfantasy.bandcamp.com/album/tephra-ep

@mildfantasy
@furtivetrax

PREMIERE: Furtive - Tephra (Mild Fantasy)

Pre-order: https://mildfantasy.bandcamp.com/album/tephra-ep

Tephra is the latest mesmerizing, propulsive EP by Philadelphia-based rave conjurer @Furtive released on @mildfantasy. With captivating woozy arpeggios, high-pressure textural progression, and sharp scintillating sound design, a highlight of the EP is Iris Blur with its dizzying melodic progression.

Tephra EP

More exclusive music

Premiere: Furtive 'Iris Blur'

Sympathies is a series of self-released EPs by Furtive, showcasing an extensive catalog of personal production. 

Sympathies 1 has Furtive coming in swinging with 5 uncompromising techno tracks. 
With an ominous, benthic snarl, the EP opens with My Skull is an Alien Terrarium, an implacable warehouse pounder sporting bouncy but savage percussion. 
Opilione is a blistering tumble along a sputtering, rolling bassline, skittering percussion, and delirious, glittering synths. 
Parallax Sentiments is a high-voltage rave weapon. Shimmering, warping textures float over a reckless sprint of a drum pattern, as a dizzying synth arpeggio drives the energy higher and higher. 
Perception Facets takes a step back from the peak-time savagery, allowing Furtive to demonstrate more angular takes on percussion in this stalwart, high-pressure tool. 
Shadow Dance is a simple and functional, but ferocious acid track. Initially produced start-to-finish in just one hour, this aggressive little track was passed around among some DC and NYC DJs under the name “TAC I.” Shadows Dance is a slightly edited and re-mastered version for release on Sympathies 1. 

Sympathies is named after a series of portraits, experimental photographs, and weird VHS footage incidentally produced together with Furtive’s dear friend Matty during a wild, debauched studio session. 

EP artwork by Furtive

https://furtivetrax.bandcamp.com/album/sympathies-i

Furtive can also be found at:
https://www.instagram.com/furtive.sasha/
https://www.facebook.com/Furtive-428062837679498

My Skull Is An Alien Terrarium

Sympathies is a series of self-released EPs by Furtive, showcasing an extensive catalog of production. With his signature understated bravado and studio idiosyncrasies, the DC-based producer reveals seven tracks of tuff drums, cryptic shifting textures, and weird acid on his second personal release. 

The murky, serpentine track Zamenis kicks off the EP with clattering percussion and grinding textures set against a pensive, primordial atmosphere. This driving dancefloor wiggler can be slowed down to effectively add a more hypnotic, trippy mood to a mix.

Void Profusion is a bold, rolling track that pairs a pressurized acid line with veils of mirage-like gossamer pads. This track can serve as a hefty dancefloor cudgel or as cruise control in a dynamic, banging set.

KetAnemone is a scuzzy, slow-burning acid bomb that aptly conveys the stroboscopic propulsion and dissociative warehouse mayhem of powders creeping into the bloodstream 

Sympathies II winds past the bellicose, clanging tones of Soma Vulture, the constricted and gritty synth punctuation of Karada, and Puncture’s malevolent synth stabs and glistening, flickering textures to arrive at Undivided. Opening with a commanding kick and rippling percs, Undivided immediately demands attention, building into a blissful, dreamy haze before slamming right back into a full-tilt acid workout. Too sincere to be over-the-top, Undivided is an exultant, shameless acid anthem. 

Sympathies is named after a series of portraits, experimental photographs, and weird VHS footage incidentally produced together with Furtive’s dear friend Matty during a wild, debauched studio session. 

EP artwork by Furtive

Karada

Soma Vulture

Furtive contributes an acid-drenched remix of Ne/Re/A's debut track We Conform to a high-powered remix compilation. 
Ne/Re/A's first original production, a high-octane, warbling, EBM-flavored beatdown, was initially released on Bound NYC's Auricular Discipline I compilation to enthusiastic response. Furtive, an accomplished if elusive DC-based producer, DJ, and promoter delivers a relentless acidic sprint of a remix with warping trance-y arpeggios and galloping kicks. 

Downloads enabled. 

Full release is available below:
https://djnerea.bandcamp.com/releases

Original production by Ne/Re/A
Artwork by Emanuel Carballo

Ne/Re/A - We Conform (Furtive Remix)

Sympathies is a series of self-published releases by Furtive, showcasing an extensive catalog of production. For the series’ third installment, the DC-based producer unleashes eight knock-out tracks of slippery, warping, acid-steeped techno boppers.  

Purchase: https://furtivetrax.bandcamp.com/album/sympathies-iii

Subduction crowns the release with tectonic force. Pounding kicks and trippy synthesizer ripples steadily build, erupting into a glowering acid line. This volcanic track deftly tightens the screws with an implacable, psychedelic-leaning techno flow. 

The release snakes through the bouncy, sliding Reprobate, Surfactant, and Soporific, all anchored by creeping earworm arpeggios wriggling and flickering over kinetic, frictionless low-end power.
	
Extremophile has Furtive stretching his signature tangled, warping sound design and perky acid across a rolling and funky electro workout. Further percussive funk comes out in Composite Muse, an angular, off-kilter technoid journey across see-sawing arpeggiation. 

Furtive flexes some tuffer directions with the bombastic whirl of Destroy All Permanents and the muscular pummeling from Troublemaker.

Sympathies is named after a series of portraits, experimental photographs, and weird VHS footage incidentally produced together with Furtive’s dear friend Mycie during a wild, debauched studio session. 

EP artwork by either Furtive or Mycie. Things get a little blurry.

Sympathies III

Troublemaker

Destroy All Permanents

Surfactant

A set recorded and "performed" at Cybr Rave, the first edition of a virtual party series organized by Parasite label boss Virgo, hosted on virtual chat platform IMVU. Virgo's project developed into SLIT, a regular and popular hard techno streaming party, hosting the likes of Tommy Four Seven, Viscerale, Schacke, and plenty more.

Cybr Rave took place shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic fully disrupted all global club culture, and just as streaming parties were lifting off. This party countered the looming quarantine gloominess by pulling together a diverse, tuff, and fun lineup featuring Are:gone, BitterBabe, GET FACE, GAMI, Keanu Orange, Souls Departed,Adar Geva, A.D.R., Dallas James, M7, and Virgo. 

Tracklist:
Cornfield - Unknown Footprint
Max Durante - Italian Resistance
Matt Ess - Infect
Florian Meindl - One Step Ahead
LNA - Squandering
SWHR - Letters from the Night (choke)
Anthro - comforting lies
Exsiderurgica - Deepfake
Derivatives - Text for a Reinvestment in the Social Body
IR00049 - Don't Fuk Me
FadeFace - Runia (P. Lopez remix)
Hd Substance - Ephemeris (plural remix)
Robert Hoff - Future Robot

Cybr Rave - Furtive set 4.4.20

Sympathies is a series of self-published releases by Furtive, showcasing an extensive catalog of production. The fourth installment has Furtive exploring new ground and re-focusing familiar high-impact approaches, yielding a 9-track release of scintillating drum’n’bass, driving psychedelic techno, and tuff dancefloor weapons.

The steady, driving techno brain-melter of Contre-Jour launches the release, setting the stage with dizzying lost-in-space arpeggiation and progessive, growling bass mutations. [Faltering] Ego Integrity continues wriggling down the wormhole, with dubbed-out psychedelic washes spilling off of warping synth contortions.

With Wicked Threshold, Furtive introduces a new direction: a thoroughly personal take on crepuscular, phantasmic drum’n’bass. With a gauzy melodic cloud, the track snatches the imagination and pulls the body along with it, tumbling through breakbeat atmospherics. Untroubled Moment is a gentle but energetic drum’n’ bass roller, with playful melodics and fuzzy-crunchy textures to lend that wiggly bounce back to relieved-unclenching-comedown sighs. The fluttering, heartfelt Felicity rounds out the drum’n’bass cuts with warm sunset glitters. With powerful low-end energy and heart-tugging sound design, Furtive lends a buoyant gloss to this release with these three tracks.

True to form, Furtive delivers several more uncompromising pedal-mashers. Kinzhal opens with a full-tilt distorted sonic assault, its thrumming bass matching up with venomous, atonal synth licks to make for a proper beatdown of a track with all of its screws turned tight. Flashbulb Osculation is a grinding, bubbling, pounding track for awkward, electrified dancefloor exchanges of saliva n’ substances. Vindicator sweeps the floor with seething, serrated sound design - an unrelenting, cranked-up weapon for frothing dancefloors.

Furtive closes the album out an atmospheric curveball: Digital Detritus is a wistful, plaintive reverie about the weird, touching, heavy, and often unexpected debris discovered in forgotten folders on nearly-lost USB sticks, fizzled hard drives, and almost-disabled accounts - a love note to finding unedited photos and breakup letters in digital hidey-holes almost lost to data oblivion, draft boxes, and/or faulty memory. Furtive weaves a moving soundscape with a yearning keyboard melody and lush, emotive sound design, tapping into the dissociated poignancy of Sad Boys aesthetics via whitearmor and Yung Sherman, as well as with a backward glance at Furtive’s long-ago experimental metal/witch house crossover project, Lavender Colored Life.

Sympathies is named after a series of portraits, experimental photographs, and weird VHS footage incidentally produced during a wild, debauched studio session.

Sympathies is a blur of emotions, experiences, sensations, relationships, and the psychedelic fragments between. 
credits
released October 1, 2020

EP artwork by Furtive
Production, mixing, mastering, etc by Furtive

Felicity

Wicked Threshold

Untroubled Moment

[Faltering] Ego Integrity

Contre-Jour

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Furtive is a full-gonzo polychromatic techno conjurer. A Washington DC-based producer, DJ, and event organizer, Furtive manifests the rave with warping, slippery textures and eclectic asides - both in their studio work and in DJ sets. Furtive helps foster nightlife as a member of SEQUENCE, a local team of rave-rats organizing some of the District’s zaniest techno parties. A prolific and multifaceted producer, Furtive has landed releases on Warok Music, ROOM, Metro Xpress, Northallsen Records, and Format Recordings, along with multiple self-published releases and a handful of further pending ones. 

Furtive's production spans from psychedelic warphole-diving techno, quirky and muscular electro, acerbic acid, crooked ratcheting bass bits, and drum & bass. The recent past has seen this elusive rave supplicant sharing billings with internationally celebrated acts like Wata Igarashi, VTSS, Rhyw, Rrose, Umfang, Sterac, Adam X, Tensal, and Developer. Beyond the dance floors and strobe lights, Furtive tinkers as a visual artist, illustrator, and tattoo scratcher.

Track Listing: 
Ventôse - yvanko
SALEM - Wings
{arsonist]} - Suppose We're Hypnagogic Elopers
Aho Ssan - Blind Power (ft. The Mensah Imaginary Band)
Othello Aubern - Buffer Zone
Lurka - Scanners 2002
Simisea - Cotorra
Dweebonthebeat - Eclibpse
Baronhawk Poiter - There's N000 Time
Jett Chandon - Flutter
Alex Pace - Collider
Ma Sha Ru - Da=Ja
Slono - mnemonics 
Rhyw - Geomest
Clotur - Transpose the System
Evigt Mörker - Smardis
Kuf - Ahmet
Bastian Balders - Vorticity (Alex Bau Repaint)
Rush Plus - Apollo
Deano - Slow Search
Max Gardner - Witching Hour
Matt Altman - Seismic Wave
Deauwd - Litter
Ari Atai - Signal
Guilt Attendant - The Icon is God
Takaaki Itoh - Anagrammer
Arthur Kimskii - Natasha
Furtive - Vindicator
TonalTheory - Lockdown
Joton - The Wolf Inside
JC Laurent - Through Differences (Mike Parker Remix)
Furtive - Effluvia
Abstract Man - Exploration
Pris - Soft Viral
Reeko - Journalistic Tool #4
Furtive - Erosion
A Thousand Details - Don Pesino (Wind Scythe Version)
Furtive - Contre-Jour
Furtive - Rat Trap 11
Wata Igarashi - Hitodama
Shlømo - Vertigo (BXTR Remix)
St Costa - Avalanche
CRK - Altiverb = Puissance

Follow Furtive
SoundCloud: @furtivetrax
Bandcamp: www.furtivetrax.bandcamp.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/furtive.sasha
RA: www.residentadvisor.net/dj/furtive

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6AM Guest Mix: Furtive

Dawnpeel

Gerbera

Potion Slurper

Pit Dragon

Scofflaw

Profligate

Dendrobatid

Repudiation

Producer/DJ/Promoter/Organizer/bonehead/etc - they/them - PHL
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For booking, production, remix work, promos, or any other inquiries, please write to: furtivetrax@gmail.com
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Upcoming Dates:
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Learn more here: https://www.attackmagazine.com/features/introducing/furtive-the-astronaut-in-a-pool-of-mermaids/
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Furtive is a full-gonzo polychromatic rave conjurer and relentless creative tinkerer. A Philadelphia-based producer, DJ, and occasional event organizer with over a decade of experience in the studio, Furtive's production wizardry has allowed them to land releases on a variety of local and international labels, along with a slew of tracks on VA compilations and dozens of self-released tracks. Furtive’s body of work comprises psychedelic warphole-diving techno, quirky and muscular electro, acerbic acid tracks, crooked bass bits, moving ambient atmospheres, and drum & bass bin-rattlers. Furtive cut their teeth as a DJ and promoter in Washington, DC’s warehouses, where they also played a turnkey role in putting on some of the District’s zaniest techno parties. As a DJ, they’ve supported internationally celebrated no-nonsense acts and held court in dingy local watering holes with eclectic selections and a steadfast focus on pacing and dynamics, regularly jumping genres to build moving, impactful sets. Beyond the fog and strobe lights, Furtive creates art in a variety of mediums, including linocuts, render art, inky drawings, and tattooing.

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Furtive grew up as a bit of a perpetual cultural outsider: born and raised somewhere in Southern California’s sun-weathered and dusty Inland Empire, but spending many formative years in Berlin, Furtive grew up between three languages and even more histories. Furtive’s musical arc zigzags wildly: from classical music, Russian pop, and a formative, fateful exposure to trance in childhood, to trashy metalcore and gabber in high school, and later to the transcendental worlds of gloomy experimental metal, Cascadian singer-songwriters, and the thrill of exploring obscure vinyl collections on sunny afternoons. 

Furtive’s production is fundamentally techno refracted through these aesthetic and conceptual sensibilities and some wacky studio idiosyncrasies, with these disparate influences coming together in their DJing and production via a sort of academic, tongue-in-cheek desire to connect all of the music that has moved and influenced them. 

As a closing note: the journey can be summarized in their own words (or, a cheeky amalgamated existential portmanteau): “I aim for the stars, but sometimes I land in a pool of mermaids.”

https://furtivetrax.bandcamp.com/
https://soundcloud.com/furtivetrax
https://www.instagram.com/furtive.sasha/
https://ra.co/dj/furtive

Furtive

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