This is a battle hymn. False Witness’ third EP The Art Of Fighting is not ambiguous about its intentions: these operatic electronic crescendos should be at max volume in your headphones when you set out in the morning to go about your life in 2017 – also known as the battle to be visible and exist.
Those familiar with the work of False Witness (née Marco Gomez), sound installation artist, rotating resident DJ for Venus X’s GHE20G0TH1K empire, and founding member of Boston’s resistant queer party collective KUNQ, will not be surprised by the martial tone of The Art Of Fighting. Gomez is driven by a love of his crew, community — but he’s been forecasting capitalism’s dire predicament his whole career. His is among the voices that need to be heard right now, the ones who weren’t taken by surprise when Hilary bit the dust, who were never fooled by the two-party system, who are now ready to start working on real acts of resistance.
So welcome to Terrordome. “The battlefield is the only world we’ve ever known: uneven, dangerous, and evolving.” So goes the press release for the four-track EP, which comes via GHE20G0TH1K’s label. It debuted last year with the release of LSDXOXO’s Fuck Marry Kill.
The tracks bring to mind a sci-fi character shooting through outer space tunnels, high-tech weapon clutched in fist in preparation for combat. What stands out here is not the producer’s beloved talent for fitting together divergent party genres — standout audio moments here are the percussion of “Panic Room” (a track featuring the EP’s sole feature by Gomez’s fellow KUNQ mind Kala) the screams of “Trust,” the sirens of “Perfect Attack.”
The message the producer is offering with The Art Of Fighting is clear, a far cry from the producer’s Lit City Trax-released 2014 EP Makina and its dembow-fueled request that we analyze the machines in which we are cogs. In his new work, the moment for self-analysis has passed, and in its place we have the call to action. “Trust” is the EP’s lone track that you could conceivably call club music, at least within the definition we had of club music before white supremacists took over the White House. The Art Of Fighting is a darker offering than we’ve seen from False Witness, but then these are darker days.