Words by Dane Harrison
With dim light, dawn treading, where one sees only the main elements and movements, shapes of form you follow with intent, but beneath the surface, twirling and turning is the body, pulling the main rotaries. The electric veins dancing on the silhouetted back bone of the dim light. This, the second album from Tokyo’s Minami Deutsch solidifies the art of hypnotic repetition the band fostered in their self-titled 2015 debut and showcases a new songwriting ability and intent to create something both extra-terrestrial and approachable. This is a record which blurs the textures of minimal dance floor techno with krautrock and progressive psychedelia whilst introducing a new depth of warm floodlight, a new beacon shining through the foggy haze, a new form illuminated with dim light.
As far as the art of repetition protrudes, these guys have waned an exciting niche, highlighting the possessive, transcendental power of subtlety in evoking change. They have a knack of creating something that seems forever moving and progressing which you are inevitably lured into and ultimately consumed and mesmerized by. It is the amalgam of a vast depth of sound, sonically interwoven and meshed in parts to be both simple and rhythmic, heavily motorik driven and pleasantly ambient to being kaleidoscopic, twirling and expansive through sharp guitar strokes and ecstatic fuzz distortion.
This manic repetition is personified in the track “Tunnel”, a reminiscent droving voyage down a repeating chasm, the result of which is a rising transcendence, a blissful state reached by following a samely path with every entrance painted different and opening into a new world. Their minimal transgression reveals itself like decoding a message, a radio transmission hypnosis, which can be played slow, soft and almost folky as in “Bitter Moon”, to an easy strolling sub-suburbia kicker in “Concrete Dawn” and even picking up on the funk train in the robotic dance warmer, “Don’t Wanna Go Back”.
The prime offering, though, comes in their new intent to create something beyond this relation to loops, something vast, delving and expanding. This is where the floodlights turn on the dim light. “Tangled Yarn”, a complex story of sounds intertwining to create a landscape of blissful vibrancy portrays an intent to turn on and open up a new dimension of sound, a truly mind-blowing wall of immersive sound that is. It’s a sonic opera, which tingles the oracular sonar and moves in all direction, breaking away from the hypnotism and blatantly mesmerizing instead.
The band’s charm is this wielding experimentation with form, which comes most vividly in the eerie and hallowing, “I’ve Seen a U.F.O.” with a sound that can only be described as shatteringly alien. It’s an otherworldly screech, a birthing of the extra-terrestrial, the soundtrack to a collapsing mind witnessing what cannot be described and to do this on record, is quite impressive, poignant and troubling like the cold sweats of a lucid nausea swirling over the body. This coming together of the rhythm, the hypnotism, the kraut, progressive and the psychedelic experience is somewhere around the effect of this spell binding band who are continually capable of lulling you into a complacent hippodrome of pounding rhythm and seamlessly able to rip it away with shattering exuberance in an instance. This record highlights their inherent talent as musicians and goes beyond their debut and terms of song writing faculty. In ‘With Dim Light’ the band have a very bright future ahead.
‘With Dim Light’ is due for release April 20th 2018, pre-order it here
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