dvdv critiques capitalism through the lens of neuro diversity on new album 'STARVVING' - out February 22nd

"STARVVING" is a haunting exploration of connection and survival in an accelerating world, where intense emotions and fantasy collide. dvdv and producer Poly Armour weave a symbiotic tapestry of ethereal vocals, pulsating electronic beats, and experimental pop that captures the hunger for meaning amid chaos.

With its dual themes of longing, escaping, and transcendence, the album vibrates between razor-sharp industrial sounds and sweeping, celestial harmonies, inviting listeners to confront fear, embrace dreams, and find beauty in the fragile threads of existence.

"Imagination is thought, which is matter"

"To exist within the binary human collective is to be manipulated within the propulsive spiral of the digital, the needling force of incessant agitation from all sides, fear dressed as power, each moment driven from outward. Too rarely are our movements driven by something truly inward. The True emotion, the Real, is so often occluded by these outward imperatives that it becomes a fight to pull them from within ourselves into the light, to be shared with others.

This dream of connection, both internal and externalized from outwards, is the key which unlocks STARVVING. Bridged by a shared sensitivity—to dreams, to emotions and the sense of existing within a living, dying universe—two artists come together across a vatic void for an album that foresees our disconnect, and forestalls it in a melding of seraphic vociferation, beats throbbing like velvet wounds in reality, and a cataclysmic synthesis of empathy and entropy that bleeds into an event horizon of ekstasis.

STARVVING is a journey through the visceral and the ethereal, an album that delves deep into the struggles of mental disorders while grappling with the challenge of surviving in a capitalist world. Survival, while escaping into dreams and imaginations. The album’s name itself plays on dual meanings: starving—the intense hunger and longing for connection, and star-wing—an allusion to celestial beings, pop stars, human mortality, or a comet streaking across the sky, a fleeting moment of dramatic brilliance in the vast universe.

STARVVING vibrates to the frequencies of both the digital and natural realms, pulsing with washes of electronic grooves and razor-sharp lashes of industrialized reverb before bursting into a fecund fever dream of crickets, wind, and the vocals of dvdv. As warm as a sunbeam from the next room over, as cold as the memory of frostbite, the latticework of aural bliss woven by her throat comforts and consumes in equal measure, pleading and prophesying as the constructs of melody meld around them. Poly Armour’s compositions swell and contract, gasping like births before shuddering into a woozy chimera of disintegrating dance and pop experimentalism. This, too, is as fleeting as a fantasy; as quickly as the connection is made, it is absorbed back into a wash of glistening ambience, to be reformed and reborn again.

Brought together first in 2018 with the single Disbelief and spurred onward after their 2020 single Overheaded topped Beatport’s Best New Electronica Playlist, dvdv & Poly Armour have released two EPs together, building up from the harder, more matte textures of EP1 and EP2 into a polished creation mirroring our chaotic age and the angst it engenders.

Deeply emotional and swimming in rich textures, STARVVING is an invitation not only to connect with ourselves on a deeper level, but to confront the things we find; to ask not what we fear, but why. A shattering of perception, brought into the comforting light of inner finality: a wormhole of seething grace. It is an exploration of survival—whether as a fleeting comet in the night sky or an angel-winged being soaring through the ether. The album’s closing moments offer a fleeting connection that dissolves into ambient washes, leaving listeners suspended in a moment of grace—both seething and serene."**

About dvdv

dvdv is the A/V moniker of multidisciplinary artist Phyllis Josefine. Her work embodies the concepts of immersion—whether going deeper within oneself or in the augmentation of realities, physical and digital—and renewal, finding new paths to move forward, to fight, and to offer new sights and sounds to pave the way forward.

With the determination of a DIY futurist and a probing compassion, she improves her practice with each new venture, self-coding her website to meet her requirements and constantly working to make her inner and outer creations more intricate.

Reflection is another key element: consideration of self, a questioning inherent within her musical work. After exploring the melancholic mental effluvia of neural networks with her 2018 debut, the interactive album ai am, dvdv's 2021 album What is the Opposite of Ambivalence (funded by Musikfonds e.V.) sought out the ghosts of night and memory, a twisting of time and energy into a powerfully emotive cyber-dream.

Her work in textiles has followed this theme as well, transforming second-hand materials with layers of reflective paint into wearable phantasms which hover amorphous in the dark: a reminiscence, a dream of desire reborn. In 2023, she released a 15-track remix compilation of her album What is the Opposite of Ambivalence with 12 upcoming artists, including Windowseeker, Aid Kid, Chewlie, Isaka, and more.

dvdv composed the original score for London filmmaker Joseph Delaney and performance artist/butoh dancer Al/ice/ex Donaghy’s collaborative Aro Archive. She has created international A/V exhibitions in collaboration with the visual artist AUJIK and was involved in the creation of Susanne Steinmassl’s The Future Is Not Unwritten, crafting 3D animation and sound for the transhumanist AI film.

Among a variety of international festivals and events, she has been invited to perform at Barcelona Eufonic, the Institut Français in Kuwait, and Munich’s Deutsches Museum, and was interviewed live on Kuwaiti radio. Her work was nominated for the ROY Pop Prize as Newcomer in 2018, and her latest music video was part of the Silver Selection at the Berlin Music Video Awards in 2022.

"dvdv explores the ways in which our relationships to the digital world often mirror elements of our own human nature, and the nature of desire itself." – The Creator’s Project

Support & Release Details

dvdv's album STARVVING was supported by Initiative Musik gGmbH with project funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media, with additional support from Musikfonds e.V. This album would not have been possible without the help of these organizations.

The music video for "Angels" will be released on 22 February 2025.