The Delay in the Universal Loop

Sharing with METAL, Dylan luliano, aka The Delay in the Universal Loop notes, “M29 is not only the closing track of the EP, it’s also the last one I wrote chronologically, and I loved the idea of introducing people to this work through its outcome — especially since it’s so different from the wreckage that came before it.” 

He adds, on this time-glitch feeling of the release that throws us between past and future, “As for time glitches, I’m almost never here. I’m either projected into the future with a huge amount of anxiety, or rooted in a past that makes me melancholic beyond words. M29 is a rare moment where I captured my present: I was living in Berlin after some of the craziest months of my life, looking back at it all and trying to make sense of it. Male, 29 years old. M29, like the bus I would jump on to see one of the closest humans I had in Berlin.”  The atmospheric lo-fi release brings together strings, mechanical drums and synth-saturated vocals to create a haunting but hopeful tune. It’s post-grunge, gritty and honest.

Collaborating with his brother, Manuel Iuliano as the director for the M29 video and his niece as the lead we follow her on a moody car journey that explores family, childhood and innocence. You can spot the Split Consciousness tape released by The Universal Loop in 2015 a little cracked in the car she travels in. It’s chosen as a throwback by Dylan Iuliano since he considers it his “first real step into adulthood, and into building a language that is both frantic and emotional.” Crushed Angels EP traces that action of opening-up with urgency, written mostly alone at night in his Kreuzberg flat healing from a hard time.

On the Split Consciousness tape Dylan Iuliano adds, "I consider that album the purest and most urgent part of me, and in the context of the video – where Ludovica (my niece, the protagonist) also represents the purest, most luminescent part of humanity—it made sense to reference it.” There’s hope in that, but the visual framing is altogether darker. Manuel Iuliano explains his favourite films are by “Quentin Dupieux, Lenny Abrahamson, Gaspar Noé, Hu Bo, but I also love some brilliant works created by siblings, like the Wachowski sisters and the Coen Brothers.” Whilst Dylan Iuliano honed in more specifics, “the car ride mood in I’m Thinking of Ending Things really stuck with me. My main references for this video were the music videos for Children by Robert Miles, Wrong by Depeche Mode, and A Barely Lit Path by OPN. They all feature a car ride in very different contexts, but they share a haunting sense of the unavoidable, the ineluctable, which was crucial for our storytelling too.” A little haunted, but moving, the video and track give an insight into the intense world of Crushed Angels.