Around this day in 2020 the video for the track “Laughter Takes Off The Edge” premiered on The Brvtalist, which was a track from the 2020 album Chin Up, which was released a few months earlier.
The video visuals sort of came from random visions in dreams, and off one of my personally favorite records by Soft Riot, although it doesn’t really sound much like the others and I never play any of these songs live. The record is more like music for listening to late at night by yourself in the dark.
Another record followed in late 2021 called Sudden Vision Zones, where I switched the name for the more soundscape-y material from Soft Riot to Ostrofti.
A new eight-track Ostrofti record will be out in October 2024 on Possession Records. New material as Soft Riot is in the sonic laboratory at the moment.
Starting today until midnight on Friday, June 26th, you can get the digital versions of the albums Chin Up and Sudden Vision Zones at a pay-what-you-want price. You can check out those albums in the players below or at softriot.bandcamp.com.
Chin Up
Chin Up contains 11 tracks of what might be loosely described as “ambient synth pop” with a running time of almost an hour. It is in a way a mirror release to When Push Comes To Shove as both records share the same approach to composition, sound design and production techniques but with different results. When Push Comes To Shove, being a milepost in Soft Riot’s main timeline of experimental, auteur synth pop, provides the extrovert side of JJD’s artistic output — an active listen that sounds suitable in a club or other energetic environment. Chin Up is a reflective mirror to these qualities; being the darker introvert counterpart, in a more sporadic, alternative timeline — a passive listen more suitable for the depths of the night after the everything has closed, alone in your apartment.
Sudden Vision Zones
Sudden Vision Zones is a 4-track album by Ostrofti, a moniker used by Soft Riot — the former being a non-sensical anagram of the latter. The new alias is used for a realm within Soft Riot‘s over-arching compositional style — meandering soundtrack pieces that reach far into ambient, drone and soundtrack-influenced electronic music. Following the release of a somewhat similar album, 2020’s Chin Up by Soft Riot, all dials were directed to writing a proper follow up to the auteur synth-pop stylings of When Push Comes To Shove during the depths of the pandemic.