#dahjyn

2. Mindsuckers – Harvey Rushmore and the Octopus

I do my best to form my opinion about music without reading other reviews, as much as is possible. At the very least, if I’m going to read other reviews I do so after listening a few times through. I’ve stuck to that here, however, I’d be amiss not to credit Broken Color Music‘s Lucy Fitzgerald for the term ‘haunted glow’ to describe this particular album. A mix of krautrock, garage rock, and psychedelic, this reminds me not just of post-punk/darkwave but specifically of the revival darkwave albums I’ve been running into as I scour Bandcamp. (Particularly I’m reminded of Ritual Howls, a comparison which I hope both parties take as the compliment it is!) Some of it is the echoing quality to the lead singer’s voice (who is not called Harvey Rushmore) making everything sound a little like you’re hearing it while being chased through movie-sized sewers by — oh, Leatherface, or Freddy Krueger, insert your villain of choice. Someone with that kind of abject sexuality to them and the 80s lights a-flickering above the asphalt and concrete. I’m a little surprised that the video for ‘Cloud Driver’ is so low-key with that in mind, but budget limitations for small labels are a very real thing, and the softness of the sunset perfectly complements the song they’ve chosen to film.

As for the vocalist: his name is Massimo Tondini, which took me a while to find out since their website (harveyrushmoreandtheoctopus.com) was having some hiccups. He also plays guitar, and is joined by Jonathan Meyer on bass, Jakob Läser on drums, and Stefan Cecere on synth, keys and guitar.

P.S.: This is a last-minute addition, but I found myself with a piece of a song stuck in my head and cursing myself — because, of course, when you mostly listen to bands from Bandcamp it’s a lot harder to just google scraps of lyrics. Then it hit me. It was, you guessed it, Cloud Driver. So kudos to you, HRATO, for successfully brainworming me.

3. An Undying Love for a Burning World – Neurosis

It is the nature of being a multigenre enthusiast that sometimes a band is an absolute monster in their specific field and I… somehow have never heard of them. This was the case for Swans (I was unfortunate enough to hear of them right before the allegations dropped), King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, and is once again the case for Neurosis. It puts me in an odd position sometimes given that I want to cover smaller artists, but at the same time, being successful in a microgenre doesn’t mean you’re making the big bucks. (Sometimes quite the opposite.) Neurosis is a post-metal/sludge band that’s been around for 30 years, and this is apparently their first new release in a decade. They’ve got a new vocalist/guitarist in the shape of Aaron Turner (Sumac, Isis) and the very first seconds of the album tell me exactly what I’m in for with fading screams of “we are torn wide open”. It should be goofy, and it almost is — but part of the gift of metal as a genre is being able to sell the sincerity of the primeval howl.

As someone who is a doom metal lover, I’m particularly appreciative of Neurosis’s willingness to let the instrumentals take their place. That’s not to say Turner isn’t front and center on many of these songs — but the most immersive part of doom and sludge for me is always when the instruments pull you in to a journey of their own. There’s a few particularly epic parts — for example, while Blind is a great song, the last minute or so kicks into high gear, and as befitting an album closer, Last Light opens with incredible mood-setting music before going on a 17 minute journey to round things off.

I’m also very pleased to see that Neurosis’s first show in seven years isn’t at a punk hall in Seattle or Detroit, but in Montana at a festival held by the Blackfeet Nation — invited by Firekeeper Alliance, an organization aimed at reducing youth suicide rates in Blackfeet country. In researching this, I found an interview with Steve von Till of Neurosis I think is worth sharing. With how dark the topics and world of metal and extreme music can get, it’s wonderful seeing musicians commit wholeheartedly to what that means — to being there for those who struggle instead of just a brief acknowledgement that they’re in the audience.

4. Some Leaves Must Fall – Temple Rat

I wish I knew the name of certain instruments that I hear a lot. The Chinese woodwind that opens up Some Leaves Must Fall is one of those omnipresent sounds in films, particularly wuxia and wuxia-inspired, and it has such a lovely resonance to it — especially as Temple Rat takes a noise many of us are familiar with in one way or another and builds and builds on it. Of course, I’m likely showing my ignorance of a larger context, but it’s a great way to open an album. The first track is ‘Sichuan 西向蜀都‘ (I’m not entirely confident in my translation of the second half as someone with very limited tools but I believe it reads Westward to Sichuan or something of the sort) and the music only ratchets up from there, although it never quite leaves the realm of hypnotic trance.

Temple Rat in fact recorded this album while traveling between Sichuan and Berlin, and the tracks incorporate samples from both locations. I’m particularly captivated by the percussion, which feels like a ‘no duh’ moment on a trance album — but there’s something immediately attention-grabbing about what often fades into the background. Truthfully that can be said about a lot of these tracks. On one hand, they’re not the type of thing you need to turn everything off to appreciate; I’ve been listening while writing, reading, etc. On the other hand I’m never bored and I’ve listened easily 3-4 times over now. Even the most interesting ambient tracks out there sometimes fade a little too much into the background, but Temple Rat is right here and right now, front and center.

5. Kielder Water Music – Dan Moore

A concrete structure like from a dam, surrounded by abstracted shapes in flat colors – a red diagonal line next to black, next to mint green, next to blue scattered with white flecks. Black fills the upper half and lower diagonal quadrant of the album cover.

This is the second ambient/experimental album I’ve seen recently to be exploring a specific place affected by industrial excess (the first, or rather chronologically the second, is coming up in my May column) and I have the sneaking suspicion I’ve seen others. I’m not surprised, though. The idea of empty, desolate spaces as jumping-off points for experimental musical exploration just makes sense to me. Kielder Water Music is a particularly strange one, exploring the Kielder Dam in Northumberland that was built for an industrial expansion that never came. The project is apparently sponsored by Arts Council England and describes the dam as a “monument for a forgotten future”, which feels like a particularly interesting turn of phrase to use in today’s English political atmosphere. I have the ‘luck’ of being a citizen who no longer visits home, though, so I simply raise a glass in sympathy to everybody dealing with the post-Brexit atmosphere — and in appreciation to the art on display here.

The album itself draws on recordings made at the site, as well as a few sound clips from interviews with people who still live and work at the dam. The result is a rise-and-fall swell of sound, like an orchestra tuning but perfectly in sync with each other, echoing around the immensity of the dam itself. Perhaps I’m just being artsy again. Either way, I like it a lot.

6. New Plastik Abyss – Dead Finks

A painting of a red room with a black door and a white floor. Just off-center is a woman with no face, golden-brown hair and a black dress, holding a curved sword in one hand and a dagger in another. At her feet is what appears to be a giant crab. At the top is the band name in Gothic Blackletter font.

I don’t know when the last time was I saw something tagged as hardcore punk, post-punk and pop. Even funnier, I don’t know if I’d argue with any of them. The Dead Finks are a Berlin-based group who don’t sound at all like it, which the liner notes acknowledge in a way I have to share here, with an apology to my Berlin friends – “They carve an odd niche in their home city especially; Berlin isn’t known these days for guitar-driven music, and at its worst, the city often feels like it can’t decide whether it’s a giant club, a dysfunctional commune, or a content farm for a venture-capital-backed start-up.” Ouch. I hear it, though. There’s less Krautrock in the Dead Finks and more California surf-punk, especially in their lyrics. “It was like all my insides had melted in the heat/ Not dumb enough to offend but still not eager to please/ Crush me into powder and inhale me by the pound/ When I hit your bloodstream I can surely kill you now” from Anodyne is some fantastic writing, and yelled in A+ punk style over thrumming guitars. Nor is this the only song dealing with drug use in a witty but dark way. ‘Stolen Vehicle’ and ‘Contempt’ both handle the topic, while others touch on toxic relationships.

Kudos, in particular, to the jazzy and upbeat opening to the song called… ‘Social Suicide’. If you don’t have a dark sense of humour, are you really a punk band? I’ll certainly be checking out their back catalogue if this is as trademark as the liner notes make it sound.

7. Hand of Thought – Sanaya Ardeshir

The first thing you should do before making any decision about this album is to listen to the first, title, track from beginning to end. From the first hesitant notes to the warbling of the synth, every piece of it is deliberate. Every stutter, every note, every strike, is placed with tremendous care.

Sanaya Ardeshir is an Indian neo-classical composer, and this album is already incredible without the context given, dancing over the line between experimental and neo-classical with barely-restrained passion. It’s the story behind it, though, that takes it all the way up to ‘great’. Ardeshir is not just Indian, but Parsi — through her matrilineal line. It’s this line of descendancy she traces as a conversation or a collaboration with her ancestors, engaging with the oh-so-prevalent idea that children and grandchildren carry the expectations and unlived lives of those who came before them. Live a good life for your mother, and grandmother, and great-grandmother, who worked hard so you could get this far. “The Hand of Thought is the hand extended across generations, weaving together a shared ownership of history and a refusal to let the light of creation be extinguished,” Ardeshir shares, and it’s a gorgeous reclamation of something often experienced as a negative.

8. Les Idées – Phloe

There’s a perception in certain parts of the world that ambient music is sleep music — sometimes affectionately (or less-so) called ‘whale noises’. It’s not a bad thing, or rather, it doesn’t have to be. That said, not all ambient is aiming to be sleep music. That’s what interests me about Phloe’s album Les Idées. According to the liner notes, these tracks are the result of composing sleep music and then — paraphrasing mine — getting carried away while learning the saxophone. The result is a beautiful form of low-key, wandering jazz that — with the exception of the final track — is rather perfectly formulated for the insomniac. Even if I’m prevented from actually sleeping to this due to logistical reasons (I’m hard of hearing and thirty years of taking them out to sleep makes any noise an instant death stroke to rest) I find myself closing my eyes and enjoying the dreamscape of it. The depth and layering of the production helps significantly — I love nothing more than the feeling of floating in sound — and the usual freeform nature of ambient is tempered with an underlying sense of structure, progressive though it might be.

The final track, a twelve-minute high-tension livewire, is an oddly placed sonic departure — but stunning nonetheless. I just pity the poor person who puts on the full album to sleep and finds themself jolted into wakefulness by a song that feels a little like the sonic equivalent of defusing a bomb. (At least comparatively speaking. I listen to a broad enough array of genres that these statements have to be contextual — it’s no Stress by Justice.) Because, or despite, of this tension it’s the most immediately engaging song on the album, never mind being the longest. (Put it on while playing a survival game like Don’t Starve and thank, or curse, me later.)

I’m also intrigued by the label — a Kordel Records in Frankfurt, Germany. A sub-label of Seil Records, the label is a community of electronic musicians — in other words, unless I’m completely misunderstanding, a collective rather than a traditional label. This is, for your information, the fastest way to catch my attention as a label.

9. MYST.wave – ako

I have one friend in my life who is extremely unplugged from the gaming world. Perhaps that gives the wrong impression. The only games he plays are Mario Kart on the Wii and Block-Out on the iPhone. I’m constantly having to explain gamer jokes like ‘Press F to pay respects’ and even ‘Leroy Jenkins’ to him, and it makes me feel a little better for how little of a gamer I am. I do like my games — I just exclusively play roguelikes and tend to hyperfixate on the same ones for years at a time. I’ve been mainlining Crypt of the Necrodancer into my veins since 2019, and play maybe four others.

This little sidenote is, I promise, relevant context — it’ll help you understand why I know vaguely what Myst is, but have never actually played it. Nor did I have a firm idea in my head of what it looked like until doing a little research after listening to this album. So when I say that MYST.wave is gorgeous, you know that I’m not speaking from nostalgia or the rose-colored glasses of the retro gamer. The music, for me, has come first.

So what, exactly, is this album? It’s a set of reimaginings of the Myst soundtrack — and for those who are like me, Myst is a classic game released for Mac (and then PC) in 1993. I don’t know how much of the music here is sampled versus recomposed, but either way, it reminds me of some of the best game soundtracks out there while also having a distinctive beat to it likely introduced by ako. It’s also made me really, really want to play Myst, so, congratulations.

10. Peace Medal — Dahjyn

A black background with a white-bordered rectangle in the center. In the rectangle is an inverted-color, monochromatic image of an abandoned suburban street — high powerlines, single-storey houses, hedges and bare trees.

Every now and again I see a tag that just utterly baffles me. I can’t think of any reason to tag this as pop other than to get more eyes on it, and that seems cynical — but nevertheless, it’s these little mysteries that sometimes make an album so compelling. Dahjyn’s Peace Medal is a piece (sorry) of trippy industrial work with Bauhaus/Type O Negative vocals snarled from far away and half-hidden under the crashing and grinding of guitars, synths and assorted electronic work. It’s like watching a Lovecraftian robot fall apart in slow motion. It’s a mournful, more than scary, album — “Lack of a Better World” feels like a dirge to a better world, and the opening of “That Morning” reminds me of such doom/gothic standbys as My Dying Bride.

I feel like a broken record at this point, but it is criminal that brilliant musicians — especially in genres like this one — will post their works with no accompanying lyrics. Please, my friend! Give me insight into your brilliant work! Even if you’re actually just growling about Doritos, I’d like to know. (And besides, that’d be a great gag. Kind of like those Skrillex tracks.) Still, the atmosphere created by Dahjyn’s work does speak quite effectively for itself; the lyrics would be a nice touch, but not necessary in the way I find they are for some works. Favourite track: ‘Talk Like A Prison’.

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And that’s all for March! Stay tuned for April and May, coming soon on the heels of this one.

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