Sd Laika

Sd Laika, the project of Wisconsin's electronic musician Peter Runge, debuted with the six-song EP Unknown Vectors (Lost Codes, 2012), with the industrial contorsions of Creepy Crawling, the squealing carillon of Tropic Of Cancer and the subliminal viscous dance of Spaceman Piff, followed by the instrumental album That's Harakiri (Tri Angle, 2014), a collection of brief cubistic electronic vignettes. Most of them (notably Great God Pan) thrive at the intersection of distorted synth-pop, musique concrete and glitch music, and the dancefloor is mostly a second thought (with exceptions like the robotic-ethnic dance Meshes). Runge displays virtuoso skills in the way Gutter Vibration weds a warped muffled electronic melody with a rhythm made of synth bubbles and bicycle bells, and in the way a Remote Heaven dances at a rhythm of typewriter and Morse code, and in the way a limping piano melody emerges from sulfuric emissions in You Were Wrong, like the lonely surviving plant in a postnuclear landscape. There isn't enough substance (nor emotion) and the album feels like a remix of the Tonto's Expanding Head Band for the age of glitch electronica.

Sd Laika then released the singles Reckless (2014) and Sanpaku Island (2015), as well as the EPs Mostly Trash (2015) and Dreadful John (2015).

Sd Laika returned with the single Latent Fish (2018).

Sd Laika mysteriously disappeared in 2023.