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CF Review: Digital Suspiria: When the Machine Learns to Feel by Vexillary on con:trace

There are albums you listen to. And there are albums you invoke. Digital Suspiria, the new record by Vexillary, clearly belongs to the second category.

From its opening moments, the project of New York–based producer Reza Seirafi makes it clear that this is not simply a collection of tracks, but a kind of electronic ritual in which the tension between the human and the synthetic returns to the center of the stage. That is hardly accidental. The artist’s trajectory has long been defined by precisely this kind of experimentation. As he himself has explained, his music is shaped by “a seductive current of melancholy” and by an almost scientific approach to sound design.

Before fully committing to music, Seirafi worked as a chemist and perfumer. His fascination with “the hidden links between seemingly unrelated chemical ingredients that produce otherworldly aromas” eventually migrated into sound. In Vexillary, that alchemical logic translates into an unlikely yet precise fusion of decadent techno, darkwave, and EBM, where each release feels like a new experiment: “balanced, volatile, and anything but formulaic.”

Photo by KEYI Studio

After more than a decade of releases and the founding of his own label, con:trace, the artist has steadily refined a darker and increasingly conceptual universe. If Full Frontal Lunacy explored madness and collapse, and Horror in Dub descended into bass-heavy electronic terror, Digital Suspiria emerges as another mutation: less explicit storytelling, more sonic precision.

The artist himself describes it as “a hypnotic collision of technoid energy, occult undercurrents, and cybernetic sheen,” where sterile surfaces conceal something far more sinister beneath. Rather than presenting a linear narrative, the album unfolds through ritual fragments: meticulously sculpted songs, voices flickering “like transmissions from inside the machine,” and the persistent sense that something is unfolding just beyond perception.

https://soundcloud.com/egroove/premiere-vexillary-pardon-me-contrace

The journey begins with “Pardon Me,” a perfect opening that reactivates the foundational conflict of electronic music: the friction between the human and the machine. Here, a surge of alternative-rock energy collides with expansive electronic structures, producing a texture where nostalgia and intensity merge into a single propulsion.

From there, “Kill Shot” introduces a seductive duality: sounds that suggest imminent danger yet remain strangely playful. The BPM gradually rise while retro atmospheres project toward a future that briefly feels like the fulfillment of early electronic music’s utopian promise.

With “1000x,” the intensity spikes. The track brushes against industrial and metal territories, unleashing a relentless energy that offers no relief. Body and mind are pushed through deliberate sonic wear and tear, as each measure accelerates the sensation of unstoppable momentum.

https://soundcloud.com/substantiv/premiere-vexillary-kill-shot-ctr011

After that assault, “Away” shifts the mood entirely. The sound becomes more velvety, transporting us to a distinctly early-2000s atmosphere—an era when the technological optimism of the new millennium began to fade. In that sense, the track becomes the soundtrack of a future that never quite arrived, where hope slowly dissolved into uncertainty.

“Actor Bahn” restores movement with a pulse that evokes European dance floors of the 2000s, when Detroit techno and rave culture detonated across Germany. The track channels that legacy like a sonic cascade, propelling the listener toward yet another possible horizon.

https://clubfuries.com.mx/2026/03/19/cfp-vexillary-digital-suspiria-ctr013/

The title track, “Digital Suspiria,” appears as a kind of recoding of Vexillary’s sonic universe. Textures soften slightly while the voice reaches sweeter tones, as flashes of trance glide through the track like neon lights drifting across an alternate reality.

But the calm doesn’t last long. “Werewolf” pulls us back into the darker territory of the project: dense electronics, ambiguous vocals, and a constant sense of transformation. The music seems to split into three simultaneous forces—the human, the animal, and the machine—coexisting within the same pulse.

In “Riptide,” the album enters a transitional zone. Everything suggests that something is about to change: the current intensifies, risk becomes palpable, and time itself appears to pause just before a potential collapse.

https://soundcloud.com/livingtechno/premiere-vexillary-1000x-contrace

And then comes “Trance U.S.A.” A closing moment that, in many ways, encapsulates the album’s logic: radiant, direct, uncompromising. Pure gold, as if the entire ritual had been building toward that final flash.

Because in the end, Digital Suspiria is not merely an album. It is a digital spell, “encoded in tension and exorcised through sound,” as the artist describes it. A work where electronic music returns to what it has always been at its most powerful: a space where machines do not replace the human, but instead reveal it in its strangest and most vulnerable forms.

Artist: Vexillary
Title: Digital Suspiria
Cat number: CTR013
Format: Digital
Label: con:trace
Additional mix: Redshape
Mastered by: Conor Dalton
Album art: Martin Bottger

Release date: March 20 2026
Support & Buy: Bandcamp

Tracklist
1) Pardon Me
2) Kill Shot
3) 1000x
4) Away
5) Actor Bahn
6) Digital Suspiria
7) Werewolf
8) Riptide
9) Trance U.S.A.

Vexillary

con:trace

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Club Furies

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