Sunday, Feb 15 Rickshaw Stop + Popscene co-present BLOOD CULTURES support tba 7 pm doors $20 adv / $25 doors all ages Art should speak for itself. This has been a guiding principle for Blood Cultures, who have always operated without ego and preamble for the music, allowing space for interpretation from the listener. This intentionality is the through line between each project that the anonymous New York experimental pop outfit has released: the genre-blurring sound of their acclaimed 2017 debut album Happy Birthday and the group’s practice of obscuring their identities (often performing in black hoods) immediately distinguished them as a singular presence in the music landscape. Their follow-up album, Oh Uncertainty! A Universe Despairs (2019), solidified their cult status with a public manifesto, affirming their commitment to anonymity as a way to “keep the relationship between the listener and the music as pure as possible.” By this time, Blood Cultures had evolved from a one-person bedroom project into a full live collective, all while maintaining a strictly enigmatic presence. In 2021, they returned with a third album, LUNO, introducing an industrial edge to their sound while simultaneously solidifying their indie pop sensibilities on breakthrough single “Set It On Fire” (14M+ Steams), and followed that up by collaborating with Goth Babe for “Driving South” (40M+ Streams) in 2022. Recent months have also seen Blood Cultures co-create and curate The Olive Tape, a fundraising compilation album for Palestinian relief. With their latest project, Skate Story, Vol.1, another conceptual album that doubles as the soundtrack to the highly anticipated indie video game Skate Story, Blood Cultures has introduced a hyper-interactive listening experience. The collaboration began when Sam Eng, the game’s developer, reached out as a fan in 2020 after skating through New York City and listening to Blood Cultures’ music, sparking a full-blown creative partnership. Set in a demon-populated, underworld version of NYC, the soundtrack sought to capture the city’s distinct environmental sound, leading to hundreds of field recordings taken from its streets, subway stations, and general ambiance — essentially sampling the city itself. The result emulates the experience of the motion and life of New York City, as filtered through lived memory. The sounds, while recorded directly in the city, have been chopped and pitched to a dreamlike quality, once again leaving room for personal interpretation of the project. Rather than scoring a finished narrative, Blood Cultures developed the soundtrack alongside the game, allowing music and design to shape each other in real time. The result is an album with its own arc and ambiguity, existing both within and beyond the world of the game: both standalone pieces of art, intersecting companion pieces to one another. https://www.blood-cultures.com/