Dark industrial dancefloor flirters
Who they?
Total immersion is the name of the game here. In their own words, Glasgow/Berlin-based industrial duo Scott Caruth and Nikki Tirado sum their project up thus: “I didn’t become a little bit of a Leatherette, I became a Total Leatherette”.
Why Total Leatherette?
You can’t go wrong with music that’s sexy, subversive and primed for the darkest corners of the dancefloor. Their first release, 2016’s ‘Fist & Shout’, interpreted minimal electronics, post-punk and rhythmic noise through a queer experimental lens. The follow up, 2017’s ‘For The Climax Of The Night’, continued in a similarly throbbing vein, with throbbing also being the correct word to describe the album cover, which featured an image of a man contorted in an act of auto-fellatio.
Tell us more…
A 50-minute long continuous performance piece, ‘Sleight Of The Third Eye’, is Total Leatherette’s third album and the first they’ve self-released. Made up of recordings from a two-week residency at Glasgow’s Centre for Creative Arts (CCA) in the summer of 2018, it marks their most improvisational and experiential work to date. Pounding beats, eerie whispers and moans, expressive manipulation of tempo, and a generally gothic atmosphere are all held together by the “textural backbone” of a Roland RE-201 Space Echo tape delay unit. The residency culminated in an eight-hour durational interpretation of the Italian singer Linda Di Franco’s 1986 Balearic hit ‘My Boss’, and snippets of this are also woven into the fray. Dark and seductive, Total Leatherette prompt us to recall the visceral pull of live music and club spaces in a time when both are very much missed.
‘Sleight Of The Third Eye’ is out via Bandcamp
