Dark electronic duo, a place both wonderful and strange has just resurrected an eight year old album that almost never was.
Matter And Desire is about ecology. But in every song it’s the moment right before something changes forever. In some cases, it’s for the worst. In some cases, it’s for the better,
Matter And Desire is the staring down an apocalypse of the natural, the political, and the personal, and saying “what am I going to do now because I can’t simply do nothing?” It’s the decision to choose a path that might, for once, lead out of darkness. Then in the next song it’s a choice to potentially go the other way.
The band states, “We set out to make this album 8 years ago, and it simply did not happen. But there was never a reason, or really a desire, to finish this album. The album never went away though. We kept collecting sounds, lyrics, and even full songs. Maybe we were done with a place both wonderful and strange. But we had all these songs, ideas and sounds and they would not leave us alone.
In 2025 we finally got into a studio and finished these songs. Everything clicked, finally, and we realized we had needed to become different people in our own lives and as a creative pair, to ever get these songs to be realized and authentic.”
Matter And Desire is the sound of that moment held still, the breath before the break, the point where everything could go either way.
Matter And Desire is available on CD and on all major digital outlets worldwide.
a place both wonderful and strange is the New York-based dark electronic project of Russ Marshalek and Laura Hajek, who’ve worked together as a creative duo since 2016.
Taken from a line in Twin Peaks, a place both wonderful and strange makes deeply human, smeared and smudged darkwave with feet both on the dance floor and a locked, darkened room.
They’ve toured both an ever-evolving visceral live show and an audio-visual soundtracking of Twin Peaks’s Laura Palmer’s tragic and horrifying final moments titled “Keys Open Doors: The Hidden Life of Laura Palmer” for a decade now. The Laura Palmer-themed show saw its very final performance in April, at the gorgeous and esteemed venue The Bell House in Brooklyn, following the passing of David Lynch. Their last releases were a pair of EPs, a covers record titled Coverups and a collection titled The City Smells Like Cat Spit, both released in 2018.
Both Russ and Laura maintain careers outside of a place both wonderful and strange, in art and otherwise. Russ is a writer, DJ and ? of the DJ collective, ADVENTURE[s], the creators of “This Party Is Killing You!”: The Robyn Party”, the internationally acclaimed pop night that precedes all other nights of its kind. Laura is also a collaborator on “This Party Is Killing You!” and maintains her own art practice and solo music and performance as Edith Pop and other monikers.
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