MC dälek and Mike Mare discuss the new album on Ipecac Recordings

Transmission 338: Interview with dälek

Featured image: © Ashkan Sahihi

Title: Brilliance of a Falling Moon
Artist: Dälek
Release Date: 2026-03-27
Genres: Experimental Music, Hip-hop
Label: Ipecac Recordings
Description: Interview with MC dälek and Mike Mare on Brilliance of a Falling Moon, out March 2026 on Ipecac Recordings.

dälek is an experimental hip-hop group founded in Newark, New Jersey by Will Brooks (MC dälek) and Alap Momin (Oktopus). The group debuted in 1998 with Negro Necro Nekros, a record that buried hardcore hip-hop under layers of noise, ambient drift, and thunderous drum breaks. Over the next decade, albums like From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots (2002), Absence (2005), and Abandoned Language (2007) pushed the architecture of rap music into territory no one else was occupying, somewhere between Public Enemy, power electronics, and industrial wreckage.

After a period of hiatus, Brooks reformed the group with guitarist Mike Mare, who had been part of the live lineup since 2001 and whose arrival began as a logistical accident: he showed up to drive the van for a tour, brought his guitar, and never left. Their latest album, Brilliance of a Falling Moon, was recorded at Deadverse Studios across 2024 and 2025 and released on Ipecac Recordings in March 2026. The title is lifted from a passage in Erik Larson‘s In the Garden of Beasts, a detail Brooks says he chose instinctively before realising how precisely it fit the present moment.

Which musical influences shaped you before you started making music, and what led you to pursue it professionally?

Mike Mare: For me, what really made me start playing as a teenager was punk and hardcore bands. Pursuing a profession I think just accidentally happened, it’s like you just start doing it and then you get the sickness and you never stop.

MC dälek: I kind of give credit to my cousins, they were DJs when I was growing up, so I was a little kid hanging out with them. They’re the ones that really introduced me to hip-hop early, so I grew up listening to everything from Treacherous 3 to Grandmaster Flash, Furious 5 to Run-D.M.C. and then later on stuff like KRS-One, Boogie Down Productions, Public Enemy, Rakim, EPMD, all that. I started as a DJ and I’d say it was when I saw KRS-One perform that’s really what made me feel like, yo, that’s what I want to do. I was in different groups throughout high school and then by the time I got to college I kind of knew that what I wanted to do was music. Happened to meet Oktopus and Josh Booth at the same college. Started recording with Oktopus, we started playing shows, basement shows, and then once we put out Negro Necro Nekros, like Mike said, the sickness, you just start touring and never stop. As far as professionally, it happens by accident, a lot of luck is involved. We happened to play shows opening up for Lovage, Mike Patton was involved in that group and he wanted to sign us to Ipecac. He put out that first record and pretty much we’ve been on the road ever since. So that’s probably the way it went down.

dälek return on Ipecac with Brilliance of a Falling Moon, eight tracks built at Deadverse Studios over two years and named after a phrase from a letter written in pre-war Berlin whose parallel to the present no one had to explain.

How did you meet and how did you decide to start this project together?

MC dälek: I started the project originally with Oktopus and then our first DJ was DJ Wreck. Joshua Booth was with us in the studio, working with us from the beginning and then Mike, we met, what year was that, man? Like probably around the second album?

Mike Mare: 2001 or something like that, yeah, it was before February came out.

MC dälek: Yeah, so like 2001, I met Mike and actually, Mike, we had a friend in common, we had a tour where we needed a driver, Mike.

Mike Mare: The wrong guy showed up.

MC dälek: Yeah, wrong guy showed up, it was like supposed to be Mike’s boy but Mike showed up, we ended up all hitting it off and asked him to come on tour with us, come to Europe with us, began as like driver doing merch, then opening act, then star player.

Mike Mare: One tour, the very first tour was like, I don’t know, a week, a week and a half, they were opening up for DJ Spooky and I was driving, doing merch and then they were like, hey, we’re going to Europe in a month, are you available? I was like, yeah, and Oktopus was like, bring your guitar also and then they were like, all right, you’re going to play your guitar into our set and then whatever, so here we are now, a couple decades later.

MC dälek: Basically after me and Okto went on hiatus, when I came back, we were both doing different things, the only other person I could imagine doing this project with was Mike and at that point we were already family, we were already working on other music anyway but he had been with the group since 2000, 2001, so he knew what the sound was, he knew who I was, how I worked and it was seamless, we were able to make it happen.

The title comes from Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts; what made that phrase feel like the right frame for this moment?

MC dälek: Yeah, it’s funny, the correlation is not one that I made, I just happened to be reading that book, that phrase appears in a letter that the ambassador’s daughter was sending to a friend and she was just describing the night in Berlin and she just in passing said “and the brilliance of the falling moon,” I just, it just resonated with me, decided to change it to A Falling Moon and make that the title. It wasn’t until John Morrison was interviewing us for the liner notes and for the bio for the album, he asked me the question where it came from and I told him and he kind of, when I got the bio back and he mentioned that it makes perfect sense because of the time that we’re living in and the correlation, I was just like, man, yeah, it was all right there, I think I just maybe chose it subconsciously, I don’t think it was a conscious selection but I think that’s what makes him such an amazing interviewer, because he kind of put that together and found the information that was right there, you know.

The ICE raids brought to mind the “I AM A MAN” marches of the sixties. What does it say about this country that certain fights never end?

MC dälek: I mean, what does it say about the world? It’s, all this shit’s been going on since way before we’ve been here, you know what I mean?

Mike Mare: We just repeat cycles, just the way of the world is just repeat cycles, you know, beyond just this country, it’s everywhere.

Colonialism, suppression of information, the demonisation of immigrants; how did you decide which battles to centre on the record?

MC dälek: I mean, I just write music that’s therapy for me, man, so, you know, what’s happening in the world seeps into my music, and it’s just things that I need to get off my chest and get out there. It’s not that I don’t know, I don’t analyze it like that.

You recorded this over two years at Deadverse. What was the most difficult track to get right?

Mike Mare: I don’t think there was any, like, you know, more difficult than the other. It’s like, yeah, you know, it was recorded over two years, but the amount of time we actually spent together was probably like in total a week. But I think everything kind of flowed naturally. It’s like, all right, here’s a song, you know, we wrote a bunch of stuff. Then we’re like, all right, let’s cut this out, cut this out. Let’s work with this. This makes up a good album. This is telling a good story sonically. Then we just went in and told the story lyrically. After that, it was just like one by one, nothing was really more difficult than another.

What non-musical work; literature, art, film, political writing; fed most directly into this record?

Mike Mare: I’m thinking anything specific to you, Will. I think it’s more just like being alive and just like, like Will was saying, you’re just absorbing what’s around you. You’re absorbing, I don’t want to use this word, reality surrounding you. That’s just what’s coming out. I don’t know. You know, he could have been reading something, watching something. I could have been reading something, watching something, listening, but it’s just an amalgamation of everything at once. I can’t specifically pinpoint one thing.

MC dälek: Yeah. I concur.

The album was recorded across 2024 and 2025. Did it change shape as events shifted around you, or did you hold to an early vision?

MC dälek: I mean, we just wrote the songs, man, I don’t know if we were trying to change anything as to what was going on around us. We were just writing these songs.

Mike Mare: Yeah. It’s like, you know, it’s that whole, the magic of music where something just comes to you and you just, it just happens. Like there wasn’t, we didn’t really think about this record. We just kind of made it. The only thought was like, let’s make a record, you know, beyond that, everything going on again, it goes back to the last question. It’s just an amalgamation of everything that’s happening. It just kind of goes through you, like Will said, it’s therapy. So everything that we’re absorbing, then it’s just coming out. I don’t think there’s any specific direction as we approached everything though, other than just stripping things back and just going back to the core of how we both started making music.

What comes after this; are you already organizing the tour, working on new material?

MC dälek: Yeah. We leave for a tour on Sunday.

Mike Mare: Yeah. We did some dates last month. We’re doing some dates this month. We got a bunch of stuff going on throughout the year.

MC dälek: I mean, we’re always working on new music. There’s not a specific plan for the next one yet, but I don’t think there usually is. I think we’ll try to just figure out when to get back together. For the rest of this year, we have a lot of dates coming up, so we probably wouldn’t get back into the studio till summertime earliest at some point. So once we get in and start working on stuff, we’ll see where it goes from there. But yeah, we’re constantly working on stuff, so I’m sure there’ll be another record after this one.

Mike Mare: There’s always stuff happening.

Photos courtesy of dälek

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others