New York Producers - Default User - Release ‘Rotation Demon’ EP
- Apr 10
- 2 min read
Aria and 5thPlanet met in Brooklyn in 2018 and bonded immediately over techno, late nights, and a shared love for the raw, unfiltered spirit of New York’s experimental underground…
For years they worked independently, absorbing influences from ambient, trance, electro, classic rock, and the city’s noise scene, before eventually coming together with zero agenda and maximum curiosity. No label brief. No target demographic. Just two producers exploring sound together and seeing where it led. Three years of collaboration later, Rotation Demon is where it led, and honestly? We’re so glad they took that journey.
The origin story of this EP is the stuff of music mythology. Long nocturnal excursions through New York’s forgotten industrial spaces — cold, alienating, strangely beautiful — led the duo to discover a decrepit piano whose worn, haunting resonances became the skeletal framework of the entire record. From those murky, atmospheric recordings they constructed a soundscape that pulls from techno, trance, ambient, noise, and experimental electronica all at once without ever feeling unfocused. It feels like a place, not a genre exercise.
Every track on the six-song project tells a chapter of a bigger journey. ‘Bad Gateway’ channels nostalgia through fractured club rhythms. ‘Paradise Planet’ builds a utopia with unease quietly undermining it. ‘Rubber Moses’ — named after Robert Moses, whose urban development vision fractured New York communities — turns hostile atmosphere into something hypnotic. ‘Xhemicals’ sends you tunnelling through a pulsar into something genuinely altered. The title track confronts the duality of meaning and emptiness after transformation. And closer ‘Amnesia’ ends things with ambiguity and emotional residue rather than a neat resolution, which is exactly the right call.
Fans of Floating Points, Crystal Castles, Legowelt, and DJ Stingray 313 will feel immediately at home, but default user aren’t imitating any of those artists — they’re operating on the same level of ambition and doing it entirely on their own terms. A debut EP that sounds like the beginning of something genuinely important.
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