!!_MAX_!!
listening to this is like a religious experience. i love how aggressively queer it is- it’s helped me with exploring my own queerness
Favorite track: SPIRITS.
With every heavy step and deep breath, D.WREX conjures a brutal and beautiful sonic experience that is as relentless as it is healing. Ferociously Queer and Glamorously Genderfluid, D.WREX is first a composer and performer from San Diego, CA who intends to create strong community using live music, story-telling, and performance art to protect and empower femmes.
Beauty and pain, fear and survival, an understanding of identity and search for catharsis—such are the juxtapositions and themes explored in the four intensely personal, shapeshifting and serpentine songs that make up the debut EP by San Diego lush avant-doom artist D.WREX (they/them), released by Volar Records. The music of D.WREX is as equally indebted to the work of Bjork and Erykah Badu, Mykki Blanco and Moses Sumney, as it is The Body and Sumac- the beautiful and the brutal sharing equal space, building on top of WREX’s history as a musician and songwriter.
The creative life of WREX started early, learning guitar and piano at age nine, performing live gigs just a few years later with their professional drummer father as support, recording albums, composing music for school plays, and generally saying yes to any musical endeavor. As a teenager, this lead to stints playing in bands equally divided between art-rock and hardcore punk, until D.WREX’s songwriting greatly expanded in preparation for their senior recital in Dec 2016 as part of San Diego State University’s Electro-Acoustic Composition Program, in which WREX was dabbling in the worlds of classical, jazz, contemporary and experimental music. WREX completed the program with songs often written on piano and arranged with scores to perform in various settings, from a dark wave mixtape with synced video projections to an operetta arranged for voice and saxophone quintet, until the draw towards performing ferocious guitar-based songs in rock venues took over, with kindred spirit (and bandmate in punk act All Beat Up) Germz on drums. From there the duo took the stage in summer of 2018 with the accompaniment of electronic tracks, which were phased out the following year. Over the next year, the band would find themselves supporting various local and touring acts in San Diego, still split between the art-rock, doom, and punk worlds, and in 2019, D.WREX began recording what would become this debut EP, with the music evolving even more in the studio as WREX began layering the songs with synth, bass, guitar, harmonies, and more. The recordings were mostly finished just as the pandemic hit in March 2020, with the past year finding D.WREX continuing to flesh out more music in anticipation of a Fall 2021 debut LP on Volar Records and forming the full live band.
credits
released March 5, 2021
Recorded, Mixed, and Engineered by Alex Jacobelli at Sunsick Studios
Mastered by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege
Composed and Performed by D.WREX
with Germz on Drums
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