Love & Hatred in MegaWave City

Glass Apple Bonzai is the synthpop project of Daniel X. Belasco, a singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist from Ontario’s Niagara region. Belasco had been playing Niagara stages since he was 13, most visibly as the leader of Defence Mechanism, an Ontario EBM group with a science fiction bent. Glass Apple Bonzai gave him room for a lifelong love of melodic synthesizer pop in the line of OMD, The Human League and Jan Hammer, with his rich baritone at the centre.

The songs took years to arrive. A demo of ‘A Million Foolish Hands’ dates to 2008, and in 2014 an Indiegogo campaign paid to finish the first album. The self-titled debut appeared that May. I Die: You Die heard it in the company of OMD’s Architecture & Morality and The Human League’s Dare, and credited Belasco with writing strong songs in the style where other retro acts leaned on kitsch. Belasco put his aim simply: “I’m trying to give people the memories without giving them the same songs.”

Night Maze followed in May 2015, less than a year later. New hardware, including Roland’s TR-8 drum machine and System-1 synthesizer, sent Belasco into a burst of writing that replaced much of the original track list in a few months. He shaped the album as a loose story drawn from a hard stretch in his own life, moving from despair through change to a kind of peace, with images of space and night running through it. A breakup sits under ‘The Stars’. ‘An Astrophysicist Love Story’ was written for Van Owen, one of the Indiegogo backers, who supplied the plot: two scientists separated by a great distance, and a machine built to bring one across the universe to the other. ‘I Don’t Mind’ was an old Defence Mechanism demo given a new home, ‘The Legend of the Anti-God’ was built on dialogue from John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, and ‘Blue Satellite’ closed the album with Belasco’s first saxophone solo, played by his live bandmate Steve. Sofa King Vinyl later pressed the album on vinyl in an edition of 200.

At the eighth Niagara Music Awards in September 2015, held at Taps Brewery in Niagara Falls, Glass Apple Bonzai went in with five nominations and won Album of the Year and Engineer of the Year. A year later Belasco took Electronic Dance Music Artist of the Year. Local gigs were harder to come by. The region had few rooms suited to his electronic show and no obvious acts to share a bill with, so he built his audience in other cities. “Who do I even put you with?” he said, picturing himself as a Niagara booker. His St. Catharines debut finally came in May 2017, on a twin bill with Winnipeg’s Ghost Twin at The Detour Music Hall.

Other cities were already listening. By the end of 2016 Glass Apple Bonzai had played Toronto’s Aftermath Festival and Terminus Festival in Calgary, and that November it crossed the Atlantic for Iceland Airwaves in Reykjavik. Calgary also supplied one of Belasco’s closest collaborators, Hello Moth, whose partnership with Glass Apple Bonzai produced the single ‘Lucid Dream’, performed live by the pair at Terminus.

By then Belasco had signed with Toronto’s Artoffact Records, which released In The Dark on December 9, 2016. The third album leaned into camp horror and devilish drama, borrowing movie dialogue in the manner of My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult and locking synth bass to the drums in the Front 242 tradition. He also named Talk Talk, Killing Joke and the synth-funk of The System as touchstones. ‘Holy War’ led the singles, ‘What They Say’ featured Hello Moth, and Alex Reed of Seeming made a guest appearance. The limited double-CD digipak added a full bonus disc of outtakes, demos and remixes, with black and purple vinyl following in the new year. Reviewers noted that Belasco sang about midnight rituals and hellfire with complete conviction, and the record stands on that conviction.

The fourth album, The All-Nite Starlite Electronic Café, arrived on Artoffact in 2019. It nodded to the neon trappings of synthwave while staying rooted in the soulful classic synthpop the project was built on, held together by Belasco’s baritone and his craft as a songwriter and arranger. That summer Glass Apple Bonzai joined Dutch industrial veterans Grendel as support on their 34-date North American Ascending the Abyss tour, which opened in Toronto on June 19 and closed in Buffalo on August 4.

Belasco kept the vault open between albums. Compendium V1 (Rarities, Remixes, and Demos), issued around the turn of 2018, unearthed dozens of demos and mixes from across the catalogue, and further collections such as Rehearsal Tapes Vol. 1 and The Way It Should Have Been Vol. 2 followed, along with a cover of Simple Minds’ ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’.

Belasco’s oldest brother died in 2021. Glass Apple Bonzai’s fifth album, Brother Bones, is dedicated to him, and Belasco called it the most personal record the project had made, a work of catharsis as well as a change of direction. Released April 5, 2024, as his first album for Pittsburgh’s Distortion Productions, it channelled his brother’s love of rock and roll. Belasco wrote, performed and produced it himself, with drummer Galen Waling (Julien-K, Lords of Acid, PIG) on seven of its ten tracks and guitarist Jamie Cronander (Combichrist) on the opener, ‘Mysteries’. Live drums and guitar moved to the front, pulling the sound toward post-punk and darker industrial textures with the synthesizers still in place. ‘Stepping Outside’ urges a friend to drop the mask, take a break for a smoke and a joke, and call the people who care. ‘Upstairs’ follows a voice calling him into the attic. The album came out on CD in a 300-copy digipak and on 200 copies of orange vinyl with exclusive edits, the vinyl sleeve carrying Belasco’s own artwork.

In September 2024 he revisited ‘The Sound of Love’ from the 2019 album as the Super Sexy Swingin’ Sax Mix, with Waling on drums and Glendon Smith on saxophone. Bag of Bones, a companion EP of outtakes and alternate mixes from the Brother Bones sessions, followed on April 4, 2025, with Waling on three tracks, artwork by Starr Noir and mastering by Martin Bowes of Attrition. In January 2026 Belasco released ‘Love & Hatred in MegaWave City’, his theme for the cyberpunk short film Love and Hatred in MegaWave City, written and directed by Leticia Buchanan and Eddie Lebron, with Allie Frost on backing vocals and Ryan Lynch on guitar for the instrumental version. The single ‘I Am a Machine’, a song about burying feeling beneath the wires until no one knows who you are, arrived on April 10, 2026.

-Robert Williston