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Corrosiv, the sophomore album from Orchestroll, reveals the duo at their most mature and vulnerable. Originally conceived as a reflection on hybridity and bastardization, the album deploys New Age and ambient compositional tropes as a launchpad, exposing their trite sanctity to the realities of corrosion. Having come of age in the 1970s and 1980s, the New Age movement perdures today as a domain of contradictions; its promise of transcendence riddled with the very commercialized dogma from which its adherents claim to flee. Healing modalities such as reiki, crystal therapy, and sound baths are simultaneously pathways to solace and sites of exploitation; their sonic counterparts—ethereal synth pads, shimmering textures, celestial drones—claim to facilitate meditation and enlightenment while devolving into empty signifiers of vitality. With Corrosiv, Orchestroll displays neither reverence nor disdain toward New Age: they exhume it instead, revealing the saccharine effervescence and commodified murk undergirding its aesthetics. The result is intoxicating—disquieting.

Born from a two-week residency at EMS Studios and expanded through a performance at MUTEK Montreal’s 25th anniversary, Corrosiv has since outgrown its original conceptual nucleus, taking on a broader scope. Its inquiry into New Age ideology’s voided rhetoric and aesthetic mysticism now informs a broader interrogation of cultural mediocrity, anti-authoritarianism, gatekeeping, music industry toxicity, and the crumbling edifice of late capitalism and techno-feudalism—all the mechanisms by which meaning is stripped from ceremony, and once-potent forms of knowledge are subsumed into the machinery of economic extraction, severed from their original essence, and transformed into hollow simulacra. Corrosiv distills these themes through a loose narrative: a soul, fixated on wellness as dictated by cosmetic economism, becomes ensnared in an endless afterlife, unable to transcend and shed its dilapidated consciousness.

Framed as an act of audio dissolution, the album thus engages in an alchemical process, whereby complex waveshaping, morphing synthesis, and distortion enact a ritual of fragmentation. There is also friction: between the rigid, mechanical imposition of systematized order and the untamed, chaotic force of organic metamorphosis. Here corrosion and confinement are not solely conceptual motifs; they are enacted in real time, sculpting the album’s terrain. Scraping, tarnishing, degradation—the languid wear of form and substance—become instruments in their own right: buffing as abrasion, entrapment as transformation, corrosion as a means of reconfiguration. The ‘protagonist,’ if there must be one, is the listener, caught within the throes of structural determinism and the potential for emancipation, unable to pass into something greater as the specters of collapsed futures accumulate in the margins.

Corrosiv extends its reach through collaborations with familiar voices: Heith (PAN), VISIO (Haunter), Femminielli (Drowned by Locals), Habib Bardi (Interzone), and Jiyoung Wi (Enmossed, Psychic Liberation, Doyenne) each leave their imprint on its sprawling landscape. At 1h16m, it is a procession, dense with earworms that burrow into the listener’s unconscious.

Misshapen, broken-down metals leach copper into blood, acid reflux burning through the core. Psyche disaggregates into cosmic turmoil, drifting between planes—tongue on rustline, gullet laced with solvent hymns, molars unlatching, bitcrushed to marrowspill. A spasm of brine, ferrous scripture, venomtext blooming in leaden rivulets, cartilage smoldering in phosphor decomposition, synapses drowning in a quicksilver choir. Crest of bile, churning ore, breath clotting into arsenic mist, vein-thread cinched, a corrosive gospel, limb by limb, oxidized to silence.

Ultimately, as the music exhales its final breath, its residue refuses to dissipate—and stillness alone remains. There are no conclusions here—no resolution, no collapse—only the slow drift outward of a vessel unmoored, lost in the sea of symbolic souring. Corrosiv sings the song of a world barren of prophecy, littered with aesthetic detritus. Whether this magic has been transfigured or simply worn away is unclear: the last breath dissipates, but the oxidation does not stop. The silence, too, will decay.

Conceptualized, composed, performed, recorded, mixed, engineered and produced by Jesse Osborne-Lanthier, and Asaël Richard-Robitaille in 2023 and 2024 at Elektron Musik Studion (EMS) - Stockholm, Sweden and Landsc8pe Studio - Montréal, QC, Canada.
Artwork by Jesse Osborne-Lanthier.
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu @ Schwebung Mastering.

HYPERWIDE LUSTRE is Orchestroll’s debut record, a mini-LP released on Montreal’s GARMO – a highly curious and deeply devolved collection of music produced and performed for a run of live club sets by the duo.

Jester-like, this is music that laughs at you: because it’s funny, because it’s not; because you did too much, because you did too little. Because you’re too loud; too quiet. Wrapped in the exquisite production chops of Richard-Robitaille and Osborne-Lanthier, Hyperwide Lustre is quasi-sarcastic and fully irreverent, a shimmering hybrid of spectral dance music and avant classical; psychedelic, cinematic, fluid, and yet bejeweled with a crushing opulence. Lovelorn synths and haunted, clattering, percussion rolls through these halls. Will you follow them to their source? Or turn away?

Like a slow labyrinthine descent into ever-less-familiar passages, Orchestroll have crafted an album that feels genuinely puzzling and new. A warm welcome into a strange world. Two puppetmasters who lost control of their puppets long ago. The keyboard whispers, but the mouse decides the tale.