CLOCK DVA BIOGRAPHY 2026
Clock DVA stands as one of the most influential and conceptually ambitious forces in electronic, industrial and experimental music. Emerging from Sheffield’s late-70spost-industrial underground, the project has evolved through multiple ground breaking phases — from raw experimental noise to cybernetic EBM precision to contemporary multimedia research.
Renowned for seminal works such as Buried Dreams, Man-Amplified, and Digital Soundtracks, Clock DVA helped define the sound and aesthetics of cyber-industrial culture. Their recent releases — including Post-Sign, Noesis, and the expanded Horology archival series — reaffirm the project’s commitment to innovation, psychoacoustic exploration, and the architecture of perception.
Clock DVA has recently returned to the stage with select international performances, appearing at major electronic and industrial festivals across Europe. Their live shows are immersive, high-intensity multimedia environments that fuse sound, video, and conceptual design into a single, unified system.
A pioneering force still evolving, Clock DVA brings a rare combination of historical weight, intellectual depth, and cutting-edge electronic power — Clock DVA is not revisiting the past. Clock DVA is advancing
CLOCK DVA – Live review London 28 November 2025
Clock DVA feel like theyʼve evolved on their own terms, mutated into something more interesting. The clinical harshness of those beats raspberry-rippled in spidering dark matter, atmospheric accents, Adi Newtonʼs broody delivery cherrying that all-important attitude. So glad we got there in time to witness in full.
Ever since Man-Amplified or maybe before that even, visuals were an important part of Clock DVAʼs mystique and tonightʼs projections onto a screen of semi-transparent silky cloth in front of them elevate that already excellent sound into something extraordinary. They felt more like apparitions, floating between audience and performers than mere projections, fractures of which were caught on the other screen behind them.
A stunning flicker-fest of swirling sci-fi and spiro-graph goodness that hooks into the music, takes you deeper into what makes them (now DVA duo of Adi Newton and Maurizio ʻTeZʼ Martinucci) tick. A splattered pharmacopoeia of richness that nourishes those atmospheric arcs, that arterial pulse.
Live itʼs more physical — in your face. The songs unravel directly, seem to slant with more urgency as that adrenalinised thump is tethered in a fragmenting free fall of images and expanding geometrics. Doesnʼt feel like a show of separate songs, but an ever- evolving spectacle that takes in the Buried Dreams album and other more recent creations.
I catch the words “Through a starless sky, my heart is black” of the “ACT” to large eyes and blurred faces, folding into a Bridget Riley cuckoo of overlapping shapes and compressed intersects. That strange whirling saucer of the sonics knuckling the kinetics and vice versa. The vitality is rich, expanding, a haemorrhaging nebula that eats into the chemical spillage of possibly “Neoteric”? That star-clustering sway of what I think was “Return To Blue”, its slumbering BPM and raspy piano distortion bathed in a moody Picasso-blue soaked screen as the freckles on a girlʼs face atomise into an explosion of petals that dusted the screen in dappled greys.
Intersecting patterns everywhere; Brion Gysinʼs dream machine, saturated, serrated on teethy triangles and uncoiling data points that created amputated hands and spinning MRI scans neuron-mapping to sweet infinity and the slippery sinister of “Hide”. That dub- like jostle of “Drive The Exotic Non-essentials” (a recent unearthing on their Second Sight comp) really gets the crowd swaying and me too, losing objectivity to a satisfying low gravity shuling dance. This was superb… razoring… ultra bright.
When “Sound Mirror” hits, itʼs cheered! Adi Newtonʼs funnelling voice… that morse-milled-codex… Tez filtering in sharp scimitars and glinting keystrokes as the taut trance-like frame hurtles hot. Thereʼs a falling spaceman on screen and you feel the helplessness in the sonic tumble of those sharpened melodics rush on over you. A life-affirming experience that ends on an updated version of “The Hacker” that mauls supernova, stuttering in harshly beaten majesty, rough-cut keys and an urgent thrust of images that pile upon your retina in stark blackʼnʼwhite.
And when the job was done, it was done, a decision no amount of synchronised screaming for “more” could resurrect an encore to. If I get the chance to see them again Iʼm going to take it. Utterly mind blowing.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps- [freq.org.uk]
