Locust/Pinback collaborator Brent Asbury releasing debut LP as Panicker

Musician/producer Brent Asbury has been active with several projects for a while. He has played with Rob Crow in Pinback and Goblin Cock; worked on several records with Justin Pearson’s bands The Locust, Retox and All Leather; and lots more. Brent is now set to release a self-titled debut LP as Panicker on April 26 via Justin Pearson’s Three One G Records (pre-order). We’ve got the premiere of “Commuter” off that album, which is a nice dose of industrial-tinged dance music. Here’s what Brent tells us about it:

A typical beginning — I just started writing some music that I wanted to listen to. It was uncomfortable and took me many places that I’d never explored musically, but I was determined to let go of any barriers of identity and let it be whatever it was going to be.

The pieces very quickly took on some cohesion and asked for a name and a plan; all of them are odes to specific personal anxieties. Panic disorder has been a central struggle of my adult life, so it seemed an obvious pairing.

It is not intentionally dance music (something which I know little about), but a lot of it probably sits around that area. There’s a heavy influence of daydream imagery — fantasies about leather clubs and the goth/punk sub-culture of the 1980’s taken from my childhood mind, but it is not an exercise in nostalgia either. Life is difficult, this music really just intended to be fun.

Justin Pearson also weighed on Panicker’s music, telling us:

Panicker makes complete sense. I’ve worked with Brent Asbury on projects pertaining to The Locust, Retox, and All Leather. He gets it on every level. Where one might make music with a certain level of knowledge and understanding of the world they come from, very few like Brent do that with the guts and smarts that are needed in the world at large.

Listen to the new song: