(29, Bucharest/Berlin) is the opposite: all presence, no filter. A former aide to a Romanian MEP, she abandoned Brussels after a leaked recording caught her calling parliamentary procedure “the slowest form of suffocation.” She now performs spoken word over industrial breakbeats. Her piece “On the Violence of Clean Desks” went viral after she delivered it while shaving her head on stage at CTM Festival. Steele’s voice is a weapon: low, grained, capable of shifting from a librarian’s whisper to a war chief’s bark in a single line. The Collision The project, tentatively titled “We Have Always Been the Glitch,” began as a dare. A mutual acquaintance—an AI ethicist with a gambling problem—claimed Dayski’s soundscapes were “too cold” and Steele’s words were “too hot.” He bet them they couldn’t fuse the two without one consuming the other.

Their collaboration, rumored for months, has finally manifested. And the underground is vibrating. Damion Dayski (34, Bristol/Oslo) rose from the forgotten corners of post-dubstep to create a genre he refuses to name. His last album, Zero-State Gravity , was described by The Wire as “the sound of a server farm dreaming it’s a cathedral.” Dayski does not perform live. He orchestrates. His medium is “glitch-texture”—a hybrid of broken analog synth, field recordings from decommissioned Soviet observatories, and AI-generated throat singing. He wears secondhand naval coats and has never given an interview without a voice modulator.

One critic who heard a private playback described it as: “Listening to two people build a fire using only their own bones as kindling.” Despite the intensity, witnesses say their off-tape dynamic is surprisingly… functional. Dayski makes pour-over coffee for Steele before each session. Steele translates Dayski’s technical notes (which he writes in a cipher of circuit diagrams and emojis) into plain English for the producer.