DTH

Songs to Sleep Next To (Self-Released, 06.2010)

For: Early-Animal Collective, Brian Eno, Wolfgang Voigt

Byline: How exactly do you approach an album tagged "haiku-ambient" or "collage-ambient"?

One thing I have learned about Dth, the New Orleans native most noted for his Books-like collage recordings, is that he is all about the exposition. Dth's albums thus far have been been packed to the gills with other, non-musical, considerations in order to make the album a listening experience, rather than a disposable piece of musical ephemera. For example, with every digital file comes a one-sheet with a haiku written for each track, as well as some crude pen-drawings designed as a kind of guide through the album. But when taken on terms of pure musicality Dth succeeds magnificently here even more so than on I Hope I Can Feel Something Like That reviewed here at the TOME only a few short months ago. Although in close proximity to IHICFSLT, Songs to Sleep Next To is miles away musically and thematically. Dth carved a nice niche for himself in musicality, garnering overwhelmingly positive reviews for his remixological audio collages, as well as suturing this nicely to a tangible theme of memory and loss. Songs to Sleep Next To tackles trickier terrain. Songs, if I am interpreting the title right and the lucid, ambient tracks correctly, is about dreams, or dreaming, or that wonderful place when you are between them. Or at least the music lends itself to that interpretation. Shying away from putting his pre-recorded audio samples in the forefront, Songs starts with "Pruny Hands Felt Health" and "You Are in the Grass" which features the atonal strumming and airy, pitch-shifted vocals that made Sung Tongs such a delightful record. This sets the stage for the rest of the album, tones fluctuate from keyed-up weirdness to an amazingly deep low end. "Honesty is God" is a collaboration with another TOME fav. Chris Rehm whose album Salivary Stones was rightfully touted as a game changing 2010 album. Things don't really get better than this. Rehm's washes of white noise are filtered through Dth's percussive editing sensibility and chopped into a percussive instrument while Dth fills in the gaps with a variety of strange electronic bat-swoops and dives. When Dth uses the recorded voice, he slips them into his compositions without location. Voices swirl in and out of a dreamscape laced with subconscious memories and overheard conversations. This is a step back from IHICFSLTS, but a huge leap forward in letting his compositions speak for themselves. The album closer "Staring Games" is unbelievably good, falling somewhere between an understated Peter Broderick sort of strummer and a shuffling, muttering sort of Phil Elvrum. While probably wary of hearing his own voice so naked and stark on tape, the track is nonetheless a career high point for Dth, a true act of honesty and fearlessness. Fortunately, it completely hits its mark.

Ryan H.

Download here from Bandcamp.

First Dog To Visit The Center Of The Earth

On Every Machine (Never Come Down, 2010)

For: Mouse on Mars, Boards of Canada, Gold Panda, Excepter

Byline: Pt. 2 in our ongoing obsession with the adventurous dog and his endless quest for subterranean spelunking.

Woah there, First Dog to Visit the Center of the Earth. Woah there, Boy Fruit. Wha’ happen’ here? You may recall back in March, when the TOME was first made privy to the existence of this wildly creative, talented regime of off-the-charts experimental noise-scramblers that Boy Fruit was the one making the singles, not FDVCE. Well, the tables have evidently turned. Boy Fruit’s latest (reviewed here) sunk his muted songs even deeper into the mud than before, circumventing the need for real melodic motifs with a wallowing texture that stewed humbly in its own tasty porridge of gloppy sound making for an at-least-as-satisfying listen to its predecessor, Repulsive. And so here, on the flip-side of things, is FDVCE, not half a year after the release of the amazing Colossus Archosaur, with an album that finds the artist really discovering the advantages of stabilizing noise and a seemingly random, multi-faceted palate of textures into a more rhythm-centric approach with some surprisingly banging beats and very compelling melodic hooks to front. FDVCE: we’ll make a producer out of you yet. Now, this of course isn’t always the case with On Every Machine, but it’s at least noticeable on a fairly large scale... and make no mistake, none of these are “pop” songs in the slightest. But check out the raga-stomp of “P-Queen”—though rife with machine-gun, percussive stabs and a rhythmic variance that rivals Aphex Twin in complexity, underneath it all is a head-nodding, driving forward motion that’s all but unstoppable. “Inner Dudsmind” and (the hilariously titled) “God Damn it, My Neighbors are Barbecuing?” find success in a similar way, the latter especially, having a faster groove with outer-space synths and nervous triangle patterns. The track sounds like the follow-up single to Geogaddi that Boards of Canada couldn't quite figure out for The Campfire Headphase... but you know, weirder. And harder. “Gator 6” meanwhile draws on a techno base, utilizing similar textures as Mouse on Mars did on Idiology, but again... weirder. So I guess the point is that none of On Every Machine will likely make it into your local discotec, lest the cool crowd in your town happen to be a bunch of freaky-deakies. But you and me and some other like-mindedly geeky music nerd friends of ours should be able to rock this one down in my mom’s basement next weekend at my birthday party. We'll just have to keep the volume down, and lights out by 11:00. We're going to freak out and it's gonna be amazing.

To me, what’s most impressive about FDVCE is his keen sense of space, timing, and volume—how each sound is so distinct and direct, yet mixed with constant and complete proportion to whatever else is going on, even while pieces and parts rise and fall and constantly fluctuate in texture. Some sounds are just so awesomely loud and robust, they’ll rattle your skull until your brain is mush, which is a much more pleasant experience than it might sound. Listening to On Every Machine is like being Neo in the Matrix movies (oh no I didn’t!) and seeing everything in digital binary to the point where all the random 1’s and 0’s come together to magically create a beautiful, harmonious din that surrounds your very essence. I’ll sum up shortly and sweetly... you’ve already waited long enough to get obsessed with First Dog to Visit the Center of the Earth. If you’ll notice, there’s no shiny, glimmering link down below that says “free download” anywhere on this post. That’s because both FDVCE as well as his equally inventive buzz-cousin Boy Fruit are both officially on a (really sweet looking) Chicago-based label. It’s not too late for you, however... you should absolutely visit the Never Come Down label’s site and haul in as much from these two astounding young men as your little hard drive can carry. GO!

—Craw’z 5/26/2010

First Dog to Visit the Center of the Earth Official MySpace

Never Come Down Official Website (buy here)

Directed by Ryan Watson

DTH

I Hope I Can Feel Something Like That One Day (Self-Released, 03.2010)

For: The Books, Okapi, Chris Rehm

Byline: A deeply human tract on memory through shared experience. Download this now.

The collage has often been seen as a derivative art-form. An attempt to force meaning out of a random series of images (pre-drawn, pre-recorded, pre-photographed) in which the "artist" has simply re-contextualized them by juxtaposing the images to each other in order to elicit some sort of subjective connection from the audience. Something you do on high school notebooks but then move on from once you discover "real" art. But then you have Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Ben Frost (the other Australian Ben Frost) who see the collage as an end in itself. A piece of art with its own intrinsic worth and possessing an internal logic that is immediately apparent. You can add New Orleans experimental/sound-collage artist DTH to that short list. DTH sifts through eras of pre-recorded voices, old home videos, last wills and testaments, man-on-the-street interviews, etc... to produce a coherent, touching statement of tangible humanism. The Books come immediately to mind, and in many ways DTH is in good company with them. Combining rummage sale of collected voices with strummed acoustic guitars, pillaged symphony scores, a lilting violin note or two, glitched out electronics, and the generally percussive nature of his editing style, DTH's characters feel like real people, aunts and uncles who died of cancer, little sisters on Christmas morning, classmates and survivors. Never expository, this collection of field recordings and people speaking directly into the microphone for the express purpose of telling their life story hearkens to the idea that once something is externalized, put on tape, written down, filmed, etc... it is no longer yours completely. Once it is out in the public domain you no longer have control of something that seems so personal, like your voice or your story. They are simply small parts of the collected human history now on tape and made available for complete recontextualization and interpretation. DTH has done something complimentary to these people and their life events, he turns them into something beautiful and emotionally true to the event being described. The emotionally transparent songs on IHICFSLTOD range from exultant, to nostalgic, and move from bitterness to acceptnce, all while wrapped in the aural warmth of coming across an old family 8mm film. This album struck an unusually emotional chord with me. And at one point seriously creeped me out. There is a moment on the second track "I'm Squeaking Everywhere" where I swear I heard my own voice. I occasionally do interviews for In Your Speakers and SLUG and through transcribing those interviews I have become acutely aware of my own voice and how much I hate it. I swear, I heard an "um" and (all to frequent in my interviews) that has the same tonal frequency as my own. Not to mention the kid in the Christmas morning segment is named Ryan. Probably not me though, I don't have a sister and I never got a cat for Christmas. But still DTH, do you have a tap on my phone?

Ryan H.

DOWNLOAD THIS NOOOOOW~~~

DTH Hompage

Boy Fruit

Repulsive (Cyber Dude, 2010)

For: Black Dice, Mouse On Mars, Coil

Byline: Noisy, funky, extraterrestrial beats: Boy Fruit lays 'em down, you do 'em up.

I’m smiling right now. Know why? I’m listening to a song called “Alien Swing” by Jason Harmon - a.k.a. Boy Fruit - and it’s one of the most demonically twisted, yet utterly funky beats I’ve come across in some time. Boy Fruit comes to us from Ohio of all places. Wait... is that right? Ohio? Do aliens hang out in Ohio? Do they have raves there? If they do, Boy Fruit might have an established residence as permanent DJ for whatever club they get down at up there in... Maumee. I don’t even want to think about what goes on at these throw-downs, especially given the grotesque (yet enticingly amazing) album art shown above, but I’m happy nonetheless bumping their jamz.

Repulsive is the newest installment of Boy Fruit tunes, one of four releases he’s now compiled, all of which you can snag off his website (linked below). I haven’t had a chance to peruse any older material yet, but Repulsive would be an impressive introduction to any artist, so this may not be a bad place to start. The album sounds pitch-bent slightly downward, resulting in a mix that feels like it’s been constructed on a soft foundation of quicksand. Oddball, whirl-a-gig noises funnel dizzyingly around your ears beneath smart, melodic hooks that tightrope walk along a wire of atonality. Synths operate here like vocals, but those of an extraterrestrial mournfully moaning away. It’s all caked together like mud atop dimensionally-shifting tunnels of drone and a trudging groove. Though the whole thing meshes well and seems fully formed, it still drips at its sides and feels unstable... remember that alien thing that killed Lieutenant Yar? This stuff kind of sounds like that guy looked. It’s also similarly slow-moving, dark and strangely sinister in tone.

The coolest thing about Boy Fruit is that though this is indeed weirdo noise experimentalism, somehow the project filters these sentiments through pop music mainstays and forms. “YOY” is a waltz, “Lump Dump” feels inspired by dub-house, and so on. Multiple listens work to unearth questions with few answers - an infinite puzzle that’ll never quite be solved but is impossible to resist from trying. It’s no surprise that this came to us here at the TOME literally within days of another release by an artist called First Dog to Visit the Center of the Earth. The two seem to be somewhat in cahoots with one another, as FDVCE appears to have posted a pic of a couple in bed together on Boy Fruit's MySpace page - the female is denoted as Boy Fruit, the male as FDVCE. Yikes. Expect a run down of FDVCE in the coming days, but for now, just take note that if you like one, you’ll probably love the other. The main differences I hear have to do with function: Boy Fruit’s tendency to produce songs that feel more like singles might be the rowdy, party-crazy teenage little brother to FDVCE’s sprawling segues and conceptually artful nerdiness.

Ohio, though... srsly. Who knew?

--Craw’z 3/9/2010

Free Download of Repulsive

Boy Fruit Official MySpace

Boy Fruit Official Website

p.s. Boy Fruit's MySpace page lists "Cyber Dude" as his record label. Hopefully it's not this Cyber Dude...