PUBLISHED November 16th, 2015 12:19 pm | UPDATED January 20th, 2016 10:34 am
COM TRUISE is one of the many personas of producer and designer Seth Haley, born and raised in upstate New York and operating out of a 12′-overrun apartment in Princeton, New Jersey. An admitted synth obsessive, Com Truise is the maker of an experimental and bottom heavy style he calls ‘mid-fi synth-wave, slow-motion funk’. Haley’s been making music on the side for roughly a decade—going through pseudonyms like toothbrushes (Sarin Sunday, SYSTM, Airliner)—first as a DJ, and currently, as an excavator of softer, window-fogging synth-wave.
While subliminally informed by both parental record collections and hints of faded electronics product design, Haley’s Com Truise project isn’t just nostalgia capitalization. There are fragments (read: DNA strands) of Joy Division, New Order, and the Cocteau Twins, but it’s like you’re hearing them through the motherboard of a waterlogged Xbox—demented and modern. He’s got a way of making familiar things sound beautifully hand-smeared.
The first Com Truise release was the Cyanide Sisters EP—distributed for free on the AMdiscs label—where mellow stone-outs like ‘Sundriped’ and ‘Slow Peels’ sat next to harder IDM bangers (‘BASF Ace’ and ‘IWYWAW’) and bumpy alt-funk trips (‘Norkuy’ and ‘Komputer’). After that came a single ‘Pyragony/Trypyra,’ and a series of eclectic podcast mixes titled ‘Komputer Cast.’ Now comfortably situated amidst the Ghostly roster, he’s prepping his next warped pillage, and hopefully not changing that name again.
Moonbeats Asia present COM TRUISE Live in Singapore is happening on Tuesday, 5 January 2015 at Club Kyo from 8.30pm till late. Admission is $30 (presale), and $40 (door). For more details, check out the Facebook page here.