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Inspired by ghost-hunting reality TV shows, Veronica 'Vern' Avola's latest alias found the Portland, Oregon based artist leaning into the brief with an album of bone-crunching beats, wailing electronics and ectoplasmic synth extrusions. Leah Kardos said: "Avola relishes taking things to playful, noisy extremes with acrid atmospherics, creepy unidentifiable clangs and clunks, and oodles of goopy pungent distortion."
The Wire's Releases of the Year 2024 playlist
Wire Magazine | Wire Magazine Issue 491/492, January/February 2025
Trigger Object is the new moniker adopted by Veronica 'Vern' Avola, and their latest release is a set of metaphysical sonic oddities inspired by the artist's love of ghost hunting reality TV shows. On Ghost Bros OST Avola relishes taking things to playful, noisy extremes with acrid atmospherics, creepy unidentifiable clangs and clunks, and oodles of goopy, pungent distortion. The ghost hunting theme is playfully explored on "Trailer Squatting Arsonist", a slow burning horror show that begins in hesitant, clunking rhythms and ends with a screaming, hissing wall of noise. "Chaos Control" is all flashing lamps, trembling side tables and EMF readers going batshit. On "Zero4 Champ DooZy-J" Avola immolates shifty synths in stinging distortion with what feels like a twisted sense of glee. Of the more rhythmically hectic tracks, "Ghost Bros Theme" and "Dunk Chud" are wonderfully crunchy and kinetic, and "My Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings" is a juddering racket of blunt force fun. The album closes with appropriately haunted epilogue "Hag Lore", full of insidious ambience and shivering revulsion.
Leah Kardos | Wire Magazine Issue 485, July 2024
Avec Veronica "Vern" Avola aka Trigger Object, les projets se suivent et réservent toujours leur lot de surprises, à l'image de Ghost Bros OST, plongée dans un univers cauchemardesque aux fantômes dansant sur des bris de verre.
Le groove aime se faire abrasif pour écorcher la peau d'êtres déjà fortement décharnés, laissant apercevoir les os striés et scarifiés à coups de basses sombres, nourries de noise viscérale.
L'indus flirte avec une forme d'acid subversif, jouant avec les stridences industrielles de machines hantées par l'esprit de musiciens issus d'un futur radioactif.
On adore la manière dont Trigger Object invente un langage entre spectres expérimentaux et ombres compulsives aux allures de kicks grinçants et suintants, élévation vers un ailleurs menaçant aux contours tranchants. Hypnotique.
Roland Torres | SilenceAndSound, August 8, 2024
Psykor was selected as one of Wire Magazine's top 50 albums of 2023!!! Below is James Gormley's December episode of Adventures in Sound and Music, which features some selections from albums on the top 50.
I love so many things about Psykor, but I want to start with the sequencing. It's next-level great. AVOLA welcomes us into this burnt husk of a world gently, with parched, expansive drones echoing through the last remnants of daylight. Plunging down through the abyss, feedback seeps into the hollows, flaring out like a debris cloud. At this point, take a breath and prepare to get blown to bits. Tension rises. Acid boils. Lightning is in the air, sparking through heavy bass rumbles and blast-furnace rhythms. The intensity grows, breaking apart before amassing into something heavier and more furious. Synths growl at the moon, and electronics spit sparks into the darkness before we wake up and realize it was all just one hell of a dream. This rips.
Brad Rose | Foxy Digitalis, The Capsule Garden Vol 2.14: April 19, 2023
Veronica Avola, da Portland, nel 2021 rientra per due mesi in Liguria, a Rapallo. Con la madre si immerge nel mondo lasciato poco tempo prima dalla nonna, vittima del COVID. Questo lutto, la sua elaborazione e i suoni dei passi scomodi e pratici da effettuare in questa contingenza, sono il polo attorno al quale questo nastro si muove. Il suono è granuloso, lento e maestoso, caldo. A tratti si potrebbe quasi ipotizzare una comunione con il dub. "Cave Rave", ad esempio, tra rimbombi e cigolii. Altrove l'ambientazione si fa più nervosa e glitch, permanendo comunque un'elasticità che sembra la cifra stilistica di Avola (nel suo passato tra le altre cose ha collaborato con Thrones, Oxbow e Daniel Menche). È un'elasticità fisica, quasi giocasse con tendini, muscoli e scorie noise, trasmettendo l'idea di una commistione quasi cyborg. Il pensiero va ovviamente a Kevin Martin, sia come The Bug che come Techno Animal. Veronica ha comunque una personalità sua ben definita e di sicuro la contestualizzazione del lavoro aiuta a definirne i confini. Quando i toni si fanno più acuti, anche solo per qualche secondo, come in "Psycho Dream", ci si ritrova tra flash e fuochi fatui che si aggrappano a trapani sulle medie frequenze che sembrano opera di Brian Yuzna e del suo "The Dentist". Poi arriva un organo e dunque il suono dell'orrore più classico, da Vincent Price a Dario Argento, si fa avanti: è "Brain Worm", vera e propria summa emozionale del lavoro, dove la luce salta e ci si ritrova assediati dal terrore. Il sistema sembra impazzito ma, in qualche modo, Avola riesce a portare a termine il proprio percorso: l'ultima traccia, infatti, "In The Mourning", è quella che, in un mondo distrutto, si potrebbe chiamare pace. Quel che sembra essere una sirena, o forse un flauto, il soffio del vento, un circuito bloccato che continua fino allo sfinimento, il nulla intorno. Mare, colline, una Liguria buia, catatonica ed incantata.
VASCO VIVIANI | The New Noise, February 2023
L'album de Veronica « Vern » AVOLA nous accueille avec Beast Belly, souffle abrasif survolant les restes calcinés d'une planète laissée à l'abandon. Mais surtout n'allez pas penser que Psykor est un énième album d'ambient, car les choses changent dès le titre suivant, Cave Rave, où des amas de débris se déplacent sur des contrées poussiéreuses, comme poussés par une forme invisible, s'éparpillant dans un espace sans fin aux horizons effacés. AVOLA offre un trip brûlant dans les profondeurs sans fond d'un monde hurlant de douleur dans le prisme muet de l'univers. Les couches se superposent accumulant l'ADN d'existences à jamais emprisonnées dans un vernis de noise virevoltante et de déchirures expérimentales. Psykor surprend d'un titre à l'autre, sautant de surfaces mobiles en espaces volatiles, nous perdant dans son chaos de sensations sombres aux mouvements fauchés par les aiguilles de montres décédées, diluant le temps dans une encre noire aux reflets irisés. Très fortement recommandé.
Roland Torres | Focus Musique, February 2023
Avola Music Video Interview: "Cave Rave" is the Thrilling Stuff of Welcome Nightmares
"Simultaneously an idyllic dream and a raging nightmare, video artist Michelle McKay's latest music video for Portland musician and multimedia artist Veronica "Vern" Avola (who goes by the moniker Avola) is an unbelievable journey through transformation. Set to slow-growing sonics which rumble as though they are moving slowly through geologic timescales, the music video for "Cave Rave" uses a blend of software programs and two weeks of "around-the-clock rendering" of AI images to embrace a wide range of colorful entities that morph in and out of one's consciousness. Among them, one catches explosive glimmers of flickering rainbow entities which oscillate endlessly between friendly and foreboding, whether they are demons, clowns, princesses, butterflies, cats, or everything literally in-between."
Watch Cave Rave
Vee Hua | Redifine Magazine, April 2023
"If the live album is a dead format, then Portland based synth excursionist Veronica 'Vern' Avola is having a wild time boogying on its grave. While many of her electronic contemporaries labour over increasingly refined, studio crafted creations, Avola's compositions prefer to shake themselves out on the dark stages of DIY venues across the western US. In 2019, she began releasing unedited recordings of her frequent live performances on Bandcamp as a diaristic series, When It Reigns, It Poors. Vol 7, the first of the series' three most recent instalments, begins, fittingly with a wry and twisted parody of stage banter. 'Thank you for being here', intones a prerecorded voice, slipping pitch like a melting candle. 'Please make yourselves comfortable'. This sample is repeated in different registers, from high, goofy chirps to deep and monstrous roars, until the layers congeal into a sludgy mass of sound..."
Emily Pothast | The Wire Magazine Issue 432, March 2020
"Avola, aka Veronica Avola, makes electronic music that combines wall noise with a delirious, Amanita Muscaria-soaked sense of dynamics. Last year, in a series entitled When It Reigns It Poors, Avola began releasing recordings of her live performances as a hyper-diligent pseudo-diaristic practice. The first nine volumes of the series tend to be loud and noisy while evoking shades of Pete Swanson's industrial death-disco and early Sun Araw's opiated sleaze dubs. But the 10th and 11th volumes largely abdicate the ferocity of earlier releases for something more layered and freakish."
Adam Lehrer | The Quietus, May 18th, 2020