who the bloody hell are these people anyway?


(Dethany+Doyle, Detroit)

The hyper-productive duo with a history for being two steps too far ahead for their own good, Bethany Shorb and Michael Doyle seek to define "the new black" with their Dethlab project, connecting the dots between trends in music, fashion, design and culture: mashing Ballardian reality with a romance for the glory days of postpunk and the cyberpunk future promised by Blade Runner.  Like a modern day McLaren and Westwood, Doyle and Shorb are obsessive consumers, creators and curators of all things dark, innovative and beautiful... often with tongue firmly in cheek.  Dethlab have brought artists such Vitalic, Solvent and Kill Memory Crash to their residency at OSLO, have performed with the likes of T. Raumschmiere, Chemlab and Ectomorph, have facilitated antics such as tea parties and period costumed croquet socials in abandoned factories, and have used nearly as much fake blood as GWAR since the project's inception one year ago.

Holding an MFA from Cranbrook, New York area native Bethany Shorb has dabbled and excelled in disciplines ranging from sculpture, to fashion and graphic design, to photography, to multimedia and music.  She has performed around the country as Toybreaker and a member of seminal noise band God and His Bitches.  As founder of Cyberoptix, she has designed a vast catalog of innovative couture, including the costumes for Skinny Puppy's 2004 world tour.  Her work has been featured in magazines such as Make and Industrial Nation.

After living in New York during the rise and fall of both the dot-com bubble and electroclash, designer, lecturer, curator and obsessive blogger, Michael Doyle moved to Detroit and promptly co-founded the Dorkwave collective.  Doyle coined the name and concise manifesto, "music for freaks", after one impropmtu night DJ'ing with Rob Theakston at the legendary UNTITLED parties.  His design work can be seen everywhere from auto show exhibits and museums to record covers, and his group blog Burnlab.net has been a favorite bookmark among taste makers for more than six years.

Dethlab's "Deth, FX and 666" treatments have turned the tamest of electro and microhouse records into thundering gnarz anthems, and their extensive collections of French electropunk and Belgian EBM records have both inspired and frightened audiences from Noir Leather fetish balls to the 2006 Movement Festival.  The duo describes their sound as "the devil's disco", and lists a combined "ten years of art school" as their primary influence.