MARKING & PLATING
Marking & Plating is a Lo-Fi French No Wave project created by two library workers trapped in Texas. The band consists of Austin scene veteran Harold Whit Williams (Cotton Mather, Daily Worker) and poet/translator Michael Perret. On their debut Zéro Vague—Marking & Plating showcase a variety of styles taking inspiration from bands like Sparks, DNA, House music, and classic French pop songs.
Created within the drab confines of cubicle land (and named after an old-fashioned end-processing cataloging unit), MARKING & PLATING started as a joke between library workers Harold Whit Williams and Michael Perret. The recording project took shape quickly under the lo-fi production of Daily Worker at his Austin, TX home studio The Kibosh. Taping their tirades and tilting at tech bro windmills, MARKING & PLATING presents Zéro Vague, snarky punk/no wave ethos informing some seriously catchy electro-pop.
Contact
Booking:
dailyworkersongbook[at]gmail.com
PRESS
“The rumbling “Space X Blow Up” opens up Zéro Vague with some ear-splitting, pressurized rock and roll, sounding like something akin to fractured surf-punk with some surprising lead guitar work making itself known in the second half of the song. The minimal synth-bounce of “Joe Rogan” is pretty far from rock music but still pretty damn catchy, although by “South of Hugo”, Williams and Perret have mostly dispensed with hooks in favor of noise. The post-punk crawl of “Drag Queen, TX” is some vintage Lone Star experimental rock that’s the only other song on Zéro Vague with prominent guitar–the rest of the record cycles between whirlwind drum-machine forward pop assaults (“Loner Star”, “Castroville”) and industrial noise collages that are only sort of grounded by the vocals (“Chez Joe Rogan”, “Spanish Dog”). The one song that doesn’t feel like an outright attack is the eerie closing track “Starbucks Gun”–all we get in this sub-two-minute outro is some words in French about Starbucks and creepy synths that roll in and out as the vocals become increasingly manipulated and edited. It’s maybe more disorienting than the in-the-red no wave drum machines.” – Rosy Overdrive