__                          _____                                     
  ______/  |_  ____ _______  _____ _/ ____\ ____ _______  _____   ____ _______ 
 /  ___/   __\/ __ \\_  __ \/     \\   __\ / __ \\_  __ \/     \_/ __ \\_  __ \
 \___ \ |  | (  \_\ )|  | \/  | |  \|  |  (  \_\ )|  | \/  | |  \  ___/_|  | \/
/____  \|__|  \____/ |__|  |__|_|  /|_ |   \____/ |__|  |__|_|  /\___  /|__|   
     \/                          \/   \/                      \/     \/

STRMGRNDR EP – PIXELGRINDER x STORMFORMER

A dark empty wet road at night. A storm in the distance. You’ve stopped to make a untraceable call. You need to tell someone that a terrible and wonderful thing is happening. There is urgency to address the blurred line between humans and machines. Colliding worlds. Future nostalgia. Digipunks and unspeakable acts. Implants and synthesis. Transcendence and annihilation. A cybernetic storm of melodic grooves and dreamy tech-scapes. Combining stormformer’s atmospheric blend of vast harmonic tension with pixelgrinder‘s cybernetic beats, bass, and cinematic sound alchemy – the pair have mixed disparate and international genres to create music that is both otherworldly and danceable. Starting with melodic sketches from stormformer, pixelgrinder has transformed and upgraded these half-remembered dreams to form music that is just as much from a possible 2079 as it is from 1983. May you dance to a future of great justice.

Composed and co-produced by stormformer (Mika Former) and pixelgrinder
Final sonic assemblage by pixelgrinder
Mixed by pixelgrinder at the Pixel Refinery, NH
Mastered by Aaron Roman at APR Studio, Sydney NSW
Cover art by ALEHA_84

When I released Vulcanelle Self Destruct I was surprised that it got such a positive response from people! In particular, my sonic chaos caught the ear of a friend on the Nine Inch Nails discord server (Discordance) – pixelgrinder and I had shared some love of early-90s-style pixel art and I was already a fan of his hard-cyber-beat dance music. He offered me an opportunity to do a collab, asking if I had any unfinished ideas that he could get involved with. Well, I have literally hundreds of these ideas sitting around, evolving as slow as glaciers move. I panicked, saying to pixel that I work so slowly that I wouldn’t be good to work with. He reassured me at every step and we found a way for us to go back and forward over DMs: me giving creative suggestions and pixel doing all the audio production to put it together.

I gave over a few dozen sketches that are not fitting into any of my exiting big themed projects, and pixel selected four that resonated for him. I encouraged him to be completely unrestrained in making these sound like they completely fit into the pixelgrinder cinematic universe. The driving electronic percussion and bass in Metal Disco, Oil Cowboy and The Taste of Honey I was totally expecting (and adore), but the astounding sci-fi-movie transformation that happened with The Lift has completely blown me away!

ALEA_84 turned our nightmarish vision into the dreamy nostalgic masterpiece that is the cover art! We are so lucky they said yes to our request and I couldn’t think of a better fit for the collision of our worlds.

The collab has caused me to have an explosion of ideas for how these songs could evolve even further, but I don’t want to risk working slowly for the next few… years. So, I may come back to those some time in the future. For now, pixelgrinder deservers massive accolades for work done that happened this year: music that dreams of the future, nostalgic for the past, and is truly of the now. The terror and hope of 2025.

STRMGRNDR EP is out now on Bandcamp, Spotify, Soundcloud and YouTube.

CC BY-NC-SA

All content on this website, unless otherwise specified, is covered by the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike license for Stormformer Productions, 2025.