BROTHERS OF THE SONIC CLOTH PROVE THEIR HEAVY METTLE, SIGN TO NEUROT

Seattle trio Brothers of the Sonic Cloth have been purveying a brutal yet artful brand of heavy metal for the last five years. Led by iconic frontman Tad Doyle, BOTSC—who include bassist Peggy Doyle and drummer Dave French—take his previous band TAD's pugilistic, song-based approach into more extreme, epic realms of the rock spectrum. All of BOTSC's hard toil has paid off in a deal with Neurot Recordings, the respected heavy-music label run by members of the bands Neurosis and Tribes of Neurot. Expect the album, which will likely be titled Brothers of the Sonic Cloth, sometime in early 2015.

"Sonically, it's going to be a lot heavier than anything I've done," Doyle says. "Those people looking for the poppier end are probably not gonna find it. Lyrically, it draws on a lot of personal and spiritual experiences as well as me recognizing mortality and being more in the moment and present."

"I really feel that this is my best work to date, and hopefully there will be some more. It's different inasmuch as there's more depth and meaning to it than the previous TAD stuff—which was good on its own, but different. When you have some time to step away from music for a while—which I did—you discover a lot of stuff that I was missing during all those years I was touring. I found a lot of great stuff and am drawing on inspiration from all across the board." Engineer Billy Anderson (Sleep, Mr. Bungle) will mix the album.

THE DBCUBE TRANSFORMS DANCING AT DECIBEL

If you attended any of Decibel Festival's recent shows at the EMP Sky Church, you may have noticed a five-sided, four-by-four-foot object behind the sound booth. That's the dBcube, produced by Microsoft and enhanced with artwork created by the local innovation studio Stimulant, specially for Decibel. Within its clear acrylic laminate surfaces sit five CPUs, five projectors, and four Kinects. When people dance in front of the dBcube's panels, it creates kinetic geometric shapes and fizzy explosions of light in conjunction with their movements. The idea is to generate connections with strangers through this new art form. It's art and technology converging to bridge the physical and virtual worlds.

Josh Santangelo, technical director at Stimulant, outlined some of the invention's possibilities. "The debut of the Cube is about interactive artwork, and the Decibel piece expresses Stimulant's passion for music and dance, but that's only one possible expression. Other artists will likely come up with wildly different experiences. Aside from artwork, the structure lends itself to the creation of illusions of the interior. I imagine a museum context where artifacts are shown within the virtual center of the volume, where various details are highlighted as you walk around it. We don't quite have sci-fi holographic tabletop displays yet, but the Cube could create something similar using current technology."