Viruses

Viruses is the long game. An ongoing electronic experimental project between Michael Vitali, Rocco DiDonna, and Jeffrey Smith, it has been passing signal between New York and Chicago for two decades — files traded, tape mangled, synths pushed into the red, songs assembled across state lines and years. The name is the method: a virus doesn't tour, doesn't rehearse, doesn't break up. It transmits, lies dormant, mutates, and reappears — and that is exactly how this project has behaved since 2006.

All methods of creation are on the table and always have been: circuit and wire, cut-up and collage, drone and pop wreckage. What matters, and what the label certifies on every surface, is that every recording in the Viruses catalog is fully organic — made before the members had ever heard of AI or had access to it in any form. In a catalog that now sits alongside hybrid, disclosure-labeled modern productions, Viruses is the control group: two decades of machine music made entirely by hands. The banner release is 'Popdust,' issued worldwide January 22, 2013 on Magnetic Eye Records — Vitali, Smith, and DiDonna staring out of the three-panel press sheet like a police lineup for a crime that hadn't been invented yet. It shared the label's 2013 catalog wall with Asvara's 'All' — two sides of the same experimental year.

Viruses never broke up because Viruses was never exactly a band: it is a standing agreement that whenever the three of them touch machines, something gets made. The full archive is being remastered and staged for the PENNY vault — every era, every transmission. It is still active. It will probably outlast the grid.