ORBIT SERVICE: Erik Drost (left) and Randall Frazier. Photo by Joep Hendrikx.
The Legendary Pink Dots and Orbit Service are two bands bound by a shared sense of mystery, atmosphere, and musical exploration. Over the years, both projects have cultivated an aura that’s equal parts cosmic and deeply personal—music that drifts between dream states, where melody and texture blur into something transcendent. Now, the connection between the two acts runs deeper than ever. Guitarist Erik Drost and keyboard and electronics player Randall Frazier—both longtime fixtures in the Pink Dots’ ever-evolving lineup—are on the road performing sets steeped in the ethereal tones of both Orbit Service’s Spirit Guide and the LPD’s latest album, So Lonely in Heaven, and the more abstract, experimental energy of Chemical Playschool 23–24.
In conversation, Drost and Frazier reflect on their creative chemistry and how their paths crossed during the making of 2004’s The Whispering Wall. They trace the evolution of Orbit Service from its early recordings to its current incarnation, and share what it means to inhabit the ever-expanding universe of Edward Ka-Spel’s songwriting. Together, they reveal that for all the mystery and gravity that surrounds their music, the heart of it all remains simple: connection, experimentation, and the pursuit of transcendence through sound.
Before playing a show in Purgatory at the Masquerade, on Friday, October 17, Drost and Frazier took an hour out of their day to talk about collaborating with each other, collaborating with Ka-Spel, and their go-to Waffle House meals while traveling across the United States.
Press play below to listen in on our conversation.
Since forming in London in 1980, the Pink Dots have carved out a singular space in the underground—too strange for pop, too melodic for noise, too abstract for goth, and too open-ended to be called industrial music. Led by enigmatic vocalist and founding member Edward Ka-Spel and rounded out by Randall Frazier (synths, samples, and electronics), Erik Drost (guitar), and Joep Hendrikx (live engineering and effects), the LPDs weave together surreal narratives and immersive, cinematic soundscapes that take shape like dispatches from a fever dream.
The group’s catalog spans countless albums, each one a kaleidoscopic swirl of experimental electronics, post-punk texture, avant-garde noise, and darkly poetic meditations on the human condition. On stage, their shows become ritualistic experiences—hypnotic and theatrical, blurring the line between performance and séance.
Erik Drost (from left), Randall Frazier, Edward Ka-Spel, and Joep Hendrikx. Photo courtesy the Legendary Pink Dots.
The LPD’s latest album, So Lonely In Heaven (Metropolis Records), finds the group at its most evocative, melancholy, and Orwellian in years, layering haunting synths, spectral melodies, and existential poetry into a deeply human meditation on isolation and transcendence. It’s a reminder that even after 40-plus years, the LPDs are still evolving; still chasing the unknown.
Bologna, Italy-based Orbit Service opens the evening with a set of deep, slow-burning atmospherics and haunted melodies. Featuring Frazier and Drost performing together, the duo builds patient, ethereal songs that hum with existential weight. They are the perfect gateway into the LPDs’ strange and beautiful world. The latest offering, Spirit Guide, leans deeper into cosmic territory, expanding its sound with shimmering drones, meditative textures, and a slow, patient gravity that feels like it’s tuning into another frequency.
For the faithful, this show is a rare chance to step back into the Dots’ orbit. For the uninitiated, it’s an invitation to get lost in one of experimental music’s most enduring and imaginative universes.
This Saturday, May 10, NoWordsATL 4.0 takes over the Garden Club at Wild Heaven West End on Sat., May 10, from 3:30-11 p.m.
This day-long festival is a celebration of instrumental, ambient, and experimental sound exploration—sans words—delivered in an environment that thrives on thick ambiance and both visceral and cerebral responses to the music.
Catch sets from an eclectic mix of forward-thinking artists, unfolding in a space that invites immersive listening. Think synth meditations, modular abstractions, steel strings, and guitar loops stretched into infinity amid light installations and projections turning the room into an ever-shifting canvas where sound and light mingle in real time.
The Harmonic Continuum is an afro-futurist, multi-instrumentalist foursome featuring Doc Calico, Billy Fields, Kenito Murray, and Kenny Web playing jazz, punk, psychedelic, and experimental rock.
Rasheeda Ali is a Grammy nominated flautist who recently stepped out from the shadow of performing alongside greats like Jeff Mills and Kebbi Williams expressing next level cosmic explorations of sound using flute, synth, and drum machines.
Shane Parish is a guitarist, composer, improviser, and leader of the avant-rock band Ahleuchatistas. He’s also ¼ of Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, and a renowned acoustic soloist.
Melodic Monster, featuring Ben Garden, is a psychedelic rock band that blends theatrics and effects in an unforgettable live show.
Alexandria Smith is an improviser/multimedia artist, trumpeter, and a professor of music at Georgia Tech, who has performed residencies at the Stone NYC, had feature recitals on the Future of New Trumpet (FONT) Festival West, Dartmouth’s Vaughan Recital Series, the VI Semana Internacional de Improvisación in Ensenada, Baja California, and Tulane University.
Spacers blend Kraut Rock and African rhythms to psychedelic effect.
Jeffrey Bützer is a multi-instrumentalist who plays accordion, toy piano, guitar, electric piano, chord organs, glockenspiel, melodica, banjo, and other noise makers to create a cinematic world of sound.
The Atlanta Improvisers Orchestrais a collective of experimental artists who use classical instruments, movement, and sound in spontaneous improvised compositions. Featuring Majid Ariam, Al-Yasha Ilhaam Williams, Ben Shirley, Priscilla Smith, and an evolving cast of various other artists.
The great Brent Hinds—former Mastodon guitar player and mastermind behind such prolific acts as West End Motel (featuring the songwriting talents of Tom Cheshire of the Rent Boy, All Night Drug Prowling Wolves, and TCB), Fiend Without A Face, and Dirty B & the Boys—takes over the Garden Club at Wild Heaven for an evening of Southern fried surf punk, country, and monster movie rock ‘n’ roll. This show brings a veritable sampler of Hinds’ various projects from throughout the years together on one stage for a night of beauty and depravity that’s not for the faint of heart.
On Thursday, March 13, an ensemble of Atlanta’s finest players are gathering at the Earl to pay homage to the music heard throughout director David Lynch’s films. The cast includes Ben Davis playing tenor saxophone, T.T. Mahony on keys, Jeffrey Bützer playing guitar, Sean Zearfoss on drums, Henry Jack playing bass and baritone guitar, and Meghan Dowlen singing alongside Don Chambers and Compartmentalizationalists.
SMOKE & FICTION: From left, DJ Bonebrake, Exene Cervenka, John Doe, and Billy Zoom of the band X. Photo by Gilbert Trejo
X takes the stage at Variety Playhouse this Sunday, October 27, as part of the group’s farewell tour, supporting their latest—and final—album, Smoke & Fiction. It’s the culmination of a long legacy in red-blooded American punk and rock ‘n’ roll, featuring the original lineup of singer Exene Cervenka, singer and bass player John Doe, guitar player Billy Zoom, and drummer DJ Bonebrake. Since forming in the summer of ‘77, X has stood as the cornerstone of Los Angeles’ first-wave punk scene. Now, 47 years later, the group is taking one last bow.
Smoke & Fiction’s June 2024 release arrived with news that the band was hanging it up for good. The album is stacked with themes of finality and reflection woven throughout singles such as “Big Black X,” which nods to their early days as punk upstarts, to other songs such as “Sweet ’til the Bitter End” and “Ruby Church,” which revisit the romantic tensions that have always simmered in X’s greatest hits.
Smoke & Fiction finds X pushing their sound into the beyond and back, with deeper, darker textures, tones, and arrangements.
Zoom’s rock ‘n’ roll twang and raw punk edges, coupled with Bonebrake’s tight rhythms, ground the album, but it’s Doe and Cervenka’s balance of dissonance and harmony—urgent, commanding, and yearning—that brings it all back home. If this really is the end, X is bowing out with the same fire and fierce integrity that made the group a legend in the first place.
Fresh off of releasing his brilliant 2022 album Music For Four Guitars (Palilalia), punk-blues and no wave-inspired improv guitarist Bill Orcutt returns to play a solo set at Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery on Sunday, February 19.
Atlanta has always provided the quintessentially weird and William Faulkner-esque Southern experience that Russian Circles’ guitar player Mike Sullivan hopes for every time the group passes through town on tour.
“I do and I don’t remember Russian Circles’ first show in Atlanta,” Sullivan says of the Chicago post-metal trio’s initial stops in town, supporting their 2006 debut album, Enter.
“We always played at the Drunken Unicorn back then,”he says. “I remember at one of those early shows that we played, Brent Hinds from Mastodon rolled up pretty early in the evening. He was riding a small BMX bike and he was tripping on mushrooms. That is exactly what you want from Atlanta,” he laughs. “And that was before any of us even knew Brent! He was there to say hi to someone else who happened to be there for the show that night.”
It’s fitting, then, that just over a decade later, Russian Circles’ musical trajectory carried the group from tearing up the stage for a sweat-soaked circle pit at the Drunken Unicorn to performing under the majestic stars of The Fox Theater, opening for Mastodon in 2017.
On October 29, Russian Circles return to Atlanta, this time playing a show at Terminal West supporting the group’s eighth and most recent full-length album, Gnosis (Sargent House Records).
Drop a needle into the record’s swirling orange vinyl grooves, and songs with titles such as “Tupilak,” “Conduit,” and the album’s title track weave together a rapturous opening salvo that is as heavy as it is pure.
Each song rises and falls with screaming, oceanic riffs and gut-pummeling rhythms in an ever-growing compositional sophistication that places the group on a tier that’s far beyond the post-metal continuum.
The guitars, drums, and bass swarm and move in ominous motions, as though they were guided by a hidden hand reaching out from somewhere deep within their collective subconscious. But as Sullivan asserts, these songs are among the group’s most meticulously arranged yet.
Throughout the album’s later songs— “Vlastimil,” “Ó Braonáin,” “Betrayal,” and “Bloom”—buzzing textures coalesce around massive and doom-laden imagery, painting a portrait of a society in decay.
The bleak beauty and the darkness that binds each song together eclipses all of Russian Circles’ previous offerings, delivering a record that is as furious as it is inquisitive, conjuring a mysterious aura of spiritual anxiety that takes shape as a singular work of understated impressionism.
The title itself, Gnosis, is the Greek word for knowledge, which often appears in religious texts denoting a deeper understanding of the universe that is arrived at only through direct engagement with the divine.
“And what is the divine?” Sullivan asks while pushing the conversation closer toward the album’s unrequited mystical angst. “What if we got it all wrong?” He asks. “What if we misinterpreted elements of faith and spirituality? What if we misinterpreted the Bible? What if we’re taking away the wrong message?”
In the end, there are no answers waiting to reveal themselves within the album’s monstrous roar and crushing rhythms, only a profound sense of reckoning with the unknown.
“That’s something that’s personal, and it’s different for each person, but it’s all tied to this idea of spiritual knowledge,” Sullivan says.
Russian Circles’ co-founding members, Sullivan and drummer Dave Turncrantz have been friends since growing up together in St. Louis.
According to lore, they’re both lifelong hockey fans, and they took the name for the band from an ice hockey practice drill.
Turncrantz is a former drummer with fellow St. Louisan heavy rockers Riddle of Steel.
Bass player Brian Cook is also from St. Louis. He has performed in These Arms Are Snakes, Botch, and played bass in Sullivan’s previous instrumental math rock outfit Dakota/Dakota. Cook joined Russian Circles in 2009, replacing original bass player Colin DeKuiper.
Over the years, Russian Circles has undergone a tremendous creative evolution that balances the lilting strings and metallic aggression that forms the backdrop for 2011’s album, Empros. For 2013’s album Memorial, the group enlisted the voice of gothic-folk vocalist and songwriter Chelsea Wolfe, who expands the group’s dynamic with her voice on the album’s self-titled closing track.
Written and recorded during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the songs on Gnosis turn inward, capturing a singularly troubled time for the group, and for the rest of the world.
Quarantine orders kept each of the group’s members behind closed doors, creating an environment in which no one was playing music or writing together at all: No practicing, no jamming, no happy accidents, and no opportunity for mutual organic growth. So rather than building songs out of ideas and fragments that were captured live and in the moment, fully formed demos were written and recorded in Sullivan, Cook, and Turncrantz’s respective isolation. Later, they shared their songs with each other and paired the material down to create a stylistically physical and visceral release.
“Gnosis was 100-percent written in our own worlds,” Sullivan says. “It was like, you construct a song on a blank grid, and parts are added, which is a way more immersive experience, as far as presenting a full arrangement: Here are additional guitars. Here’s how it will transition to the next part. It’s a completely different and more controlled approach for us. Before, it was kind of like, we would get together and just hope that something good would happen, which is kind of terrifying,” he laughs. “The songs on our first album, Enter, were just me and Dave jamming together in a room. Now, whenever we get together, we know what we’re working on. There are plenty of ideas to choose from. And if we don’t wanna work on one, there are even other ideas we can start hammering away at yet.”
The bass and drums for Gnosis were tracked at Electrical Audio in Chicago by Kurt Ballou, who also recorded the guitar and synth parts at God City Studio in Salem, Massachusetts. Ballou also engineered and mixed the album at God City.
Gnosis is the third record that Russian Circles has made with Ballou, following 2016’s Guidance and 2019’s Blood Year. It’s also the second album for which the group divided its time between Electrical Audio and God City.
“God’s City is great because we go there and Kurt has the home field advantage,” Sullivan says. “There are so many pedals, and so many different toys to play with, and different amps. As a guitar player, I’ll never complain about heading over to God City. It makes the record way more diverse sounding, just knowing all of the gizmos that he has to play with there. Kurt is also really familiar with Electrical Audio, and he just knows what to do instinctively, and he knows how to manipulate all the rack gear and everything,” Sullivan adds. “He has preferences for mics and compressors, and a lot of it goes off of Dave’s performances and tuning and Kurt excelling at what he does. What those two came up with is the best drum tone we could have captured.”
One of the more compelling moments of Gnosis, takes shape minutes into the album’s title track. The guitar kicks in on a delayed stereo effect, revealing wholly new dynamics and greater depths in the album’s sonic dimensions. It’s an effect that’s mirrored in the album’s closing number, “Bloom,” and was also used in the song “Campaign,” which opens Russian Circles’ 2008 album, Station (Suicide Squeeze).
“It’s interesting when you start utilizing stereo manipulation,” Sullivan says. “It opens up the field just a bit more. Just now, we were jamming during practice, and Dave had in his ear monitors so that he could hear himself playing. All of the drums were in mono whereas the guitar was stereo panned. Ideally, you wouldn’t want mono drums by any means, but having it there opened up the guitars. When some things are in stereo and some things are mono, it makes the mix deeper. The instruments hit your ear differently, and in a really exciting way.”
Back in 2008, when the group recorded the album Station, their engineer at the time, Matt Bayles, as Sullivan recalls, said ‘Let’s utilize some stereo action here,’ which is how the technique became a part of the group’s repertoire.
“That was the first time we did that, I was like, ‘Wow, this is like a little bit of stereo magic. This is awesome,” Sullivan says. “Now, we’re starting to consider how that technique is something we should be doing live, making the most of it, and not just reserving it for records.”
Part of Russian Circles appeal lies in its style and how the group adapts its brand of instrumental dirges to a more traditional songwriting style, as they do with “Vlastimil,” where the group expands upon its already colossal sound, while reinventing its own musical techniques.
The chemistry between the band’s members and Ballou is clearly on display throughout the album. His approach to production and engineering dovetails with the tension that builds throughout Gnosis’ serrated and gargantuan epics.
As such, the nature of their working relationship positions Ballou as something of a fourth member of the group. His presence has become key to Russian Circles’ creative evolution and success.
“If you find people that you have chemistry with, that’s a huge gift,” Sullivan says. “Do not throw that away.”
Together, their work has yielded a late body of work that is greater than the sum of Russian Circles’ parts, even though those parts are quite impressive, summoning a sense of the divine on their own terms as they illustrate the complexity of the group’s songs and history.
This story originally appeared in the October print issue of Record Plug Magazine.
If you have enjoyed reading this post, please consider making a donation to RadATL.
Bob Mould is on the road again for the Solo Electric: Distortion and Blue Hearts tour, playing songs by Hüsker Dü, Sugar, and from his latest album, Blue Hearts.
Victory Hands play the “Braden” 7-inch release party at Sabbath Brewing in EAV on Sunday, May 15. MTN ISL, Skin Jobs, and Scratch Offs also perform.
This show will mark Scratch Offs’ debut performance, so get there early.
… And if you don’t already know, Victory Hands releases are all named after journalists who were blacklisted by former President Richard M. Nixon leading up to his impeachment. Hence the titles of their previously released singles, “Bishop,”“Bernstein,” and “Anderson.”
Checkers Hot Dog Emporium will also be on deck. Check out Tricky Dick-themed menu suggestions below. … And yes, there will be veggie dogs for the veggie folks!
If you have enjoyed reading this post, please consider making a donation to RadATL.
Rad/ATL 