James Ferraro is sharing the visual for “Thrash & Escalate”, the track comes off his new album Skid Row. The record is the studio debut from Ferraro and will be available tomorrow Break World Records. It was recorded entirely in Los Angeles, CA and is the follow up of 2013’s moody brutalist masterpiece NYC HELL 3am. Skid Row deconstructs and rebuilds a scrap yard of genres and aesthetics Thrash / Country / Modern Classical / Neo-Brutalism all shuttering under a metallic detritus overloaded like a skipping CD. Read an artist statement from Ferraro below and watch the video for “Thrash & Escalate”.

from James Ferraro:

Million dollar smiles, lattes & police brutality.
Excess and fiscal ambiguity.
Media violence & Lamborghini dreams, all under one surveillance video texture.

The desert landscape, like tupperware housing digital smog.
K9’s and glistening acid rain,
wash away the sentient blood that stains the palm tree city.
An Escalade® burns on the freeway.
The drone of helicopters hum above head, in a desert backdrop commuters in traffic requite a speed of 20 mph pass the gleaming semiotic debris.
the sushi elite & the poor all anonymous in an unforgiving freeway fatality,
an undiscerning system.

Man on the highway, through a walkie talkie speaker, barefoot on the slick asphalt.
As the sunsets, the sky burns a fusion of metal and silhouetted palms.
and a hyper real civilization is rendered by it’s idealism, at war with the gravity of reality..
Rendered by it’s traffic culture, it’s culture of police brutality and gang violence, media saturation and racism, it’s glamorization and solipsism, rendered by the tabloid of it self.

” Skid Row started as a collection of poems, it came first as words, then grew into becoming the lyrics of Skid Row.. I was writing about the state of the world around me, living on what feels like the brink of societal collapse while also seeing high excess everywhere.. all the sounds of the streets crept in, the blood and tears on the street, the echoing sirens in the early morning fog, soaked into the poetry and it became evident that LA is a hyper America. a place where violence (media and real life), excess and poverty, police exceptionalism & brutality, racism interact daily.. racism is a war on reason, so in my state of animosity I wrote Skid Row, I’m a disciple of the streets my spoken word and music on Skid Row mirror these conflicts that spill out over the western landscape like a painting of America frozen in a state of hyper real war ”

Skid Row is the studio debut from James Ferraro. It was recorded entirely in Los Angeles, CA and is the follow up of 2013’s moody NYC HELL 3am.

ames Ferraro
Skid Row
Break World Records

1. Burning Prius (For The World)
2. White Bronco
3. Pollution
4. Street Freak
5. Million Dollar Man
6. Thrash & Escalate
7. Skid Row
8. To Live And Die In L.A.
9. Rhinestones
10. Doctor Hollywood
11. 1992
12. Sentinel Beast
13. At The Beach