Nothing Can 'Save Me' From Safety Trance

A longtime friend and frequent Arca collaborator — having worked on several tracks across the KiCk series including standouts like "KLK," "Prada/Rakata" and the Planningtorock collab "Queer" — Luis Garban, under his Cardopusher alias, has spent the better part of the past decade crafting raucous club killers with an underground edge. Drawing on the sounds of acid, electro, EBM and rave while adding his own experimental grit to the fray, Cardopusher is no stranger to a refined techno palette. His newest endeavor finds him looking to take a sledgehammer to the music of his youth with spectacular results.

Under Safety Trance, Garban is making a return to the old-school reggaetón sound he grew up with in Caracas in the '90s and putting a noisy, industrial spin on the beloved genre. Having introduced the world to his new moniker earlier this summer with his debut EP, Noches de Terror, which was led by the Arca-featuring "El Alma Que Te Trajo," Garban is currently gearing up for a follow-up with the forthcoming Lagrimas EP, looking to dive deeper than ever before into the darker side of reggaetón.

Today, Safety Trance returns with a new visual for his latest single, "Save Me." With booming distorted broken beats and distant blaring horns poking through the oppressive wall of noise, the producer steps away from the overt reggaetón references in favor of something more closely resembling a blown-out maximalist impression of Death Grips or clipping. Aided by the vocal talents of up-and-coming Manchester-based Iceboy Violet, "Save Me" is brutal, pummeling the listener with a relentless onslaught of noise that verges into the perversely intoxicating.

Fittingly, "Save Me" arrives alongside an equally disorienting visual with a strobe-heavy barrage of images that will give you scary flashbacks to that one bad 4 AM trip you had at that DIY warehouse rave where you nearly got tetanus. It's chaotic, dystopian and only slightly anxiety-inducing.

"With this record I just wanted to keep exploring a different, dark and emotional side of reggaetón rarely found on today's polished productions," Safety Trance says of the track. "The video represents pretty well the energy and obscurity not only of the EP but also of the whole Safety Trance universe"

Check out the PAPER premiere of the official music video for Safety Trance's "Save Me," below.

Photo courtesy of Safety Trance