...The Digital Freakshow is in town...

....Self styled Cybernetic IndustroPunk Shocktroops Arkam Asylum have built themselves a fierce reputation on the UK live circuit over the last year with their high octane mix of maverick swamp guitar, drum patterns, breakbeats, sampladelia and intense lyrical visions. True Cyberpunks, Arkam Asylum replace nihilistic visions of "No Future" with an aggressive struggle to bring the world around them kicking and screaming into *Their* Future. A world where machine is simply a third gender, where the machinations of the Military Industrial Complex are reduced to a pay per view entertainment channel, where nothing is true and everything is permitted and we are all sovereign rulers of our own temporary autonomous zones.

...Featuring Bug on samples and beats, frenzied dervish Angel on guitar pyrotechnics and one of the most charismatic frontmen around, Zero (both Edward Norton AND Brad Pitt if you follow...)

...Varyingly described as a 21st century Specimen, The Gun Club vs. Atari Teenage Riot, Bauhaus on crack (indeed, a whole slew of "insert band name here" on crack) and a bunch of fucking lunatics, the band's debut album "Learn to Love Your Cancer" - produced by Freudstein with additional noise manipulation by eXitboy and Tarantella Serpentine - certainly bore all these comments out. Follow-up "Running with Scissors" takes everything to its next level. On the surface still a bunch of noisy buggers with scant respect for the quaint notion of something for the milkman to whistle. But listen again and you'll see a whole slew of subtleties, the album is literally bleeding bursts of catchiness that'll see you singing along to it in your head weeks after the noise has disapated. If such a thing is possible, they've harnessed the high octane pisstake Gabba of Ultraviolence and smashed it head-on with the deathrock sound and a lyrical sensibility that politely suggests it's to be taken seriously for you own physical well-being. Live, the band show their pedigree as agents provocateurs, smashing laptops in front of audiences specifically selected for their prediliction for anal technology worship, conducting impromptu Chaos rituals and, should the mood so take them, accompanied by teenage sapphic gogo dancers.

"The bastard offspring of Iggy Pop and Marilyn Manson, conceived whilst both parties were off their faces on crack at an Orb gig... a psychotic blast of unrestrained nihilism and desperation."
- Rock Sound

"Arkam Asylum are what punk/new-wave would have been like if they'd had samplers and modern electronics 25 years ago. Lots of energy, ideas and imagination have gone into this astounding album, that touches on every subject that your parents wouldn't want you listening to. The use of sampling is excellent, whilst the conglomeration of disassociated noises carries the whole sound right out of the leftfield. Without coming over as at all anal, Arkam Asylum have nailed down to perfection what so many other bands have attempted so pitifully!"
- Kaleidoscope

"A mixture between Ministry (Land of Rape and Honey) & Atari Teenage Riot."
- Totem

"I have been finding the band a perfect combination of modern sound a la late Prodigy and NIN, energy and aggressiveness of early punk bands and craziness of gothic acts like Alien Sex Fiend, Specimen or Sex Gang Children."
- Cold

DISCOGRAPHY

BLISTERED THOUGHTS - 4-track demo CDR produced by Freudstein

VARIOUS ARTISTS - WORKING WITH CHILDREN & ANIMALS VOL. 1 (WASPFAC004) (includes Machine and Get Some by Arkam Asylum)

LEARN TO LOVE YOUR CANCER (WASPFAC008)

VARIOUS ARTISTS - MOONLIGHT CORPORATION VOL. 1 (includes Crucifixion)

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS (WASPFAC018)

VARIOUS ARTISTS - SICK TWISTED INDIVIDUAL (includes Gundam High)

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