Chasing Voices breaks its short ceasefire and rearms for the 5th installment in the ongoing series of musical theses at the forefront of New York City’s electronic scene. Purging the emotional distance and ironic poise of an increasingly numb aesthetic culture, “Awoken By Tears” is the naked, stark and barren truth of a deeply sentient musical form. Heartbroken and angry, this is the new techno militancy taking on the classic materials of creative drive: pain, loss, memory—those negative spaces of the human condition that lay waste to so many weak souls, leaving behind piles of dust and rubble in their path. Building from the expanses of a quiet, enduring suffering, “Awoken By Tears” builds into the ferocious and combative schizoid spasms of a full-on meltdown, a furious crescendo of multilayered drum sequences, deafening stretches of screaming distortion and the conversing groundwork of estranged and increasingly extraterrestrial synth-loops. Just before breaking point, the dark cloud recedes, leaving us empty and alone with but a few lingering chords taken from the soundtrack to the horror movie of our life that will never be made. At the end, all that’s left is a simple question?What is worse? The indissoluble pain of remembering a joy and beauty that is lost forever? Or expunging that memory to avoid feeling anything at all?