New York City’s underground electronic scene has always thrived on late nights, experimentation, and unexpected collaborations. Emerging from that ecosystem is Default User, the joint project between producers Aria Noonan and William Lakritz (5thPlanet), who now unveil their long-awaited debut project Rotation Demon.
Today’s premiere arrives in collaboration with Decent Music PR and Music Crown, offering listeners an early glimpse into a record shaped by years of creative exploration within New York’s DIY electronic community.
Default User began in 2018, when Noonan and Lakritz met in Brooklyn and immediately connected over techno, late-night bar hopping, and the raw, unfiltered energy of the city’s experimental music culture. What started without a clear plan gradually evolved into a deeply collaborative process. Over time, their shared influences, spanning techno, trance, electro, ambient, classic rock, and the abrasive textures of the local noise scene, coalesced into a distinct sonic identity.
Rotation Demon is the result of three years of organic experimentation. Rather than building tracks in conventional studio environments, the duo drew inspiration from nocturnal wanderings through the city’s forgotten industrial spaces. These stark environments, cold, cavernous, and strangely intimate, became an emotional blueprint for the record.
During one of these excursions, the pair stumbled upon a decrepit, abandoned piano. Its worn keys and ghostly resonance became the skeletal foundation for the project. Sampling and manipulating those recordings, Default User constructed a soundscape that feels equally futuristic and deeply human, blending club-focused rhythms with ambient atmospheres and fractured noise textures.
Fans of boundary-pushing electronic artists such as John 00 Fleming, Floating Points, Dave Angel, DJ Stingray 313, Legowelt, Frankie Bones, Joey Beltram, Ken Ishii, Crystal Castles, and exael will recognise familiar threads in Default User’s immersive, genre-fluid approach.
The project unfolds like a loose sci-fi narrative, with each track representing a stage of transformation.
Bad Gateway recalls the brash optimism of the early 2010s, the duo revisits their formative years as bedroom recording artists, channelling nostalgia through fractured club rhythms. Paradise Planet is about a crash-landing on a mysterious world, they encounter a euphoric rave utopia, though a subtle tension lurks beneath the surface. Named after Robert Moses, ‘Rubber Moses’ is about the controversial urban planner whose legacy reshaped and fractured New York communities, the track reflects the hostile industrial landscapes that informed the album’s sonic architecture. Xhemicals is a descent into the urban abyss launches the duo into the cosmos, tunnelling through a pulsar that permanently alters their consciousness. The title-track, transformed by their journey, they return to Paradise Planet with heightened awareness, confronting the strange duality between meaning and emptiness in a place that once felt like home. Amnesia closes the project closes with a vulnerable, unresolved reflection, leaving listeners suspended in emotional ambiguity.
All tracks were written by Aria Noonan and William Lakritz, produced and mixed by Default User, and mastered by Irving Gadoury at Hideaway Audio. The project’s visual world is captured through photography by Linda Gardens.
With Rotation Demon, Default User offers more than a debut release, it’s an immersive document of friendship, exploration, and the strange beauty found in the overlooked corners of New York City’s underground.
“Rotation Demon is a striking debut that feels both futuristic and deeply personal,” says Danielle Holian, Decent Music PR. “Default User has created a world that pulls from the grit of New York’s underground and the emotional depth of ambient and trance, resulting in a record that’s as immersive on headphones as it is on a dancefloor. It’s rare to hear a project that balances experimentation and accessibility so naturally; this is just the beginning for them.”
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