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midREMdimmerdeathbomb arc2021 CD |
reviews“Hammer and Dimuzio turn in four extended ooze-clinics, slippery, bubbling over, primordial — and It’s somehow a surprise, every time, how quickly and easily a listener is lost in the digital surf.” —The Wire “The Wire's releases of the year for 2021” —Raymond Cummings “It’s all the more unsettling that this communication does not at all dare you to decipher it or even bear witness, but taunts you into looking the other way.” —Noob Heavy The Wire Dimmer has a knack for disorientation. On their tolling, twilit 2007 debut The Shining Path, the Californian duo made misperception their mantra, with Los Angeles sound artist Joseph Hammer manipulating, looping and processing San Francisco-based Thomas Dimuzio’s modular synthesizer washes and samples into an otherworldly ambient manna. While 2009’s Remissions pivoted towards gristly sweeps of electronic feedback and static, 2011’s Ascent insisted upon a jittery, effect-splattered vertigo, all collapsed chordal moans and desolate dread. Even as headphones-equipped witnesses, it can be difficult to orient ourselves amid this fathomless, restive music, falsely placid and Halloween-séance appropriate. That the art and packaging for midREM designed by Brian Miller and Margot Padilla, evoke the freewheeling mystery and mysticism of mid-2000s Excepter LP sleeves may be an entirely coincidental twist of fate; the accompanying contents suggest that maybe it isn’t. Hammer and Dimuzio turn in four extended ooze-clinics, slippery, bubbling over, primordial — and It’s somehow a surprise, every time, how quickly and easily a listener is lost in the digital surf. “Phase III - Delta Cycles (Light To Deep)” sounds by turns like an incomprehensible orchestra tuning up and a slow-motion electro-magnetic pulse disguised as a thrumming glitch fanfare. “Phase II - Falling Higher (Sleep Spindles)”, a nauseated vortex of warps, twist, drafts and zooms, exists on a higher anxiety plane. It’s as though someone starved a littler of kittens, recorded their yowls and mixed the results, jury-rigging in a few bars of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” near the end for good measure. A sputtering grind marks “Phase IV - midREM (Paradox Of Paralysis)” which, with its dank-dungeon vibe and psychedelic, entropic synth play, brings The Spiritual Switchboard and Telecult Powers to mind; no velocity asked, and none given — at least until the song seems to steer into an active car wash. A misshapen grooves does assert itself as “Phase I - Black Light (Hypnagogic Hallucinations)” gets going, but it’s twitchy, a glow stick macramé of shortwave, echo and balloon animal tonalities, slouching idly towards daybreak. —Raymond Cummings/The Wire The Wire - Raymond Cummings TAHNZZ High Mija (Bandcamp) Noob Heavy - Mx. Zoe!’s EOTY List 2021 Commence zooted drones and burbles: you’re going to sleep. Sleep is the big ticket here, the main event. But this is the kind of sleep Steven Stapleton must have, sounding like a slow descent to the ocean floor in a shark cage, with lots of menace and the occasional precipitous drop. By the time it gracefully crescendos to its end, you feel strangely empty, sucked dry by some foreign process with unclear aims. It’s all the more unsettling that this communication does not at all dare you to decipher it or even bear witness, but taunts you into looking the other way. Like some sort of peripheral phantasm mocking the very idea of liminality, gently prodding you to chortlingly inform you that no, you aren’t in on the joke. |