Rival Consoles returns with a new album on December 3 — a resonant and explorative soundscape of original music, composed for renowned choreographer Alexander Whitley’s contemporary dance production Overflow, and shares bold opening track Monster.

Exploring themes of the human and emotional consequences of life surrounded by data, the piece echoes the concept of social media, advertising, marketing companies and political factions exploiting our data to gain wealth, political advantage and sow division. Key reading for the project was based around the contemporary philosophical work Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han.

“The piece opens with Monster which has a kind of drunken madness to it, highly repetitive to mirror the repetitive nature of how we as humans engage with technology such as social media. It’s sometimes edging towards chaos but yet always returning back to the same starting point, but eventually giving way to exhaustion. I wanted to create a bold opening piece for Overflow,” states Ryan Lee West.

Overflow was premiered by the Alexander Whitley Dance Company in May 2021 at the Sadler’s Wells in London and is scheduled to tour through theatres in Europe in spring 2022. Ryan will embark on a UK headline tour this month, followed by European and North American dates in the new year. 

· stream Monster
· pre-order Overflow on 2LP · CD · DL