Marijuana Deathsquads: Tuff Guy Electronics

Marijuana Deathsquads’ Tuff Guy Electronics is the first new music that the Minneapolis centered collective has released since 2013. It simultaneously sounds like a heavily digitized ride on the ≈ highway and a droll stroll through the apocalypse, the kind of music only people with conceptual talent to burn (and an inherent desire to touch that flame) choose to envision. It’s a pop-avant-garde paean to the space between an abstract higher power and the creative open road—full of primal groove and techno subtlety, but beholden to neither.

Marijuana Deathsquads is a Minneapolis-based noise band with an electronic, improvised, experimental sound that that defies listener expectations and easy categorization. Their ear-bending improv/dance grooves have been steadily blowing eardrums, breaking drum heads and tearing at the seams of conventional music-making since the Deathsquads semi-mysterious inception in 2009. The Deathsquads lineup is a loosely defined and mutating structure, its core consists of long time Marijuaners Ryan Olson, Ben Ivascu and Isaac Gale. These names are constants amidst a blur of collaborators.