Review Summary: D | E | C | O | M | P | O | S | I | T | I | O | N きせかえプレートで、きせかえちゃお ((( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° ))) モンスターハンタ
*hallucinating in hyperspace*
“The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters- there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void.... That’s why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.” Post-modern prophet Jean Baudrillard hints at the hyperreal as a pulse dilating within our collective consciousness, an ominous black star at risk of devouring our most primal structures and distinctions that typify what we usually render as reality. It represented by an incapacity to discern reality from its simulation (i. e. symbols and signs that attempt to reflect, encapsulate, or invent states of reality); however, the loss of this all-encompassing anchor does not trigger a lack of meaning, quite on the contrary: it unfolds a meaning so crude and undistilled that one cannot do anything against it but let go and vibrate with it, be absorbed, reduced and pleasantly percolated by its sedative, slicky, field-distorting ooze, like a lullaby intoned for the psychotic by a myriad of polimorphic, infinitely fragmentary sources, all strangely compressed inside a unitary body that keeps drifting away into chaos. If overstimulation of simulacra led Baudrillard to emptiness, later had emptiness directed him to mysticism of sorts. A charm, blurred and self-atomizing, underlying the fog. Indeed, it is no wonder why mental illnesses have taken such a glaring hold of our society, a concavity wherein information is being ceaselessly poured in stasis, where each individual is assigned to a private cybernetic psychosphere, where perceived dimensions of time and space have been altered by an irruption of (in chronological order) television sets, computers and smartphones, along with the internet: a sound infrastructure summoned to sublimate thoughts, feelings, and on a wider scope psychic energies in an incipient post-capitalism era.
‘’Matter is plastic in the face of the Mind’’, rambles Philip K. Dick prey of delirium in semiautobiographical novel VALIS. A nodular assumption among schizophrenic patients tells us that the mind resembles a highly elastic and volatile and flammable substance; therefrom it follows that every single stimulus regardless of its nature has an inner impact, even if in a subconscious level. Unconscious mechanisms aren't selective. Implied in this assertion rests the fact that each exogenous data we are exposed to anytime, in spite of how abstract or devoid of meaning it may be, is unconsciously intelligibilized and absorbed for further reproduction amongst the vast mishmash of nothing (and by the same pattern: everything) displayed in our minds, a multiplicity of images and signifiers so de-regulated as to transcend time and experience. A notion from which vaporwave furtively drinks inspiration.
This is an album about mysticism. This is an album about schizophrenia.
Surely, there is much more range to vaporwave than a definition of satirical meta-commentary of 80s mass capitalism, and the existence of Dream Sequins® means a straightforward support of this idea. Vaporwave’s bliss is as much about its form (or maybe pace, to be more precise) than it is about its content (the origin of samples used, the nebulous message it is supposed to comprise). In Dream Sequins®, Nmesh pulls off a record as well-realized as has never been made in the scope of the whole genre. Dream Sequins®, on a most essential note, is a solid experimental album. Dream Sequins® ventures further than any other vaporware release I had listened to before. It stands out from an extremely irregular but never-quite-dead scene of vaporwave produced by internet enthusiastic aficionados and a handful of eclectic musicians devoted in heart and soul to the joy of vapor, a huge load of whose works, I think, often indulge too much in pastiche aesthetics instead of delivering some actually interesting soundscapes; luckily, Dream Sequins ®is a creature of another kind. Dream Sequins pushes its concept to sheer madness; its digression spins inwards reckless and out of control. Dream Sequins® moves in colours: like a pill, enigmatically branded, inducing sensory expansion inside a float tank of primordial soup. Have you ever witnessed, whilst lying in silence and a dark atmosphere all around, your own mind drifting, projecting images and sound textures at an unbelievably frenetic rate, weird, complex, beautiful, hell-ish, ephemeral enough to be juxtaposed and substituted within the blink of an eye? Arguably one of the most extraordinary deeds of Dream Sequins® is its ability, almost organic, to tune in with the listener’s mind in the sense that it generates a self-reflecting impression, as if your own unconscious patterns were being mirrored in the surface of music. It builds up to an acute and somehow ***ed-up catharsis. Imagine yourself lying on a beach in midday light, covered in sweat, lines and colours are of blinding intensity; suddenly, you become aware that the sky is slowly falling, like a palid curtain striving to lick a surface, and by the time it touches the sea time and matter (you, yourself, a piece of hallucinated flesh that claims to be your own) are sucked into a void of indistinct entropy within whose dynamics a sense of calm chills… ocasionally.
Nmesh relies on cultural symbols and referents as much your next door’s sensuous vaportape. From music (10cc, Mariah Carey) to movie (Donnie Darko), going through videogames (Mario Bros., Street Fighter) and YouTube videos (the last track is specially exhilarating, featuring Anthony Fantano’s voice chopped down and distorted to the unrecognizable, extracted from his widely infamous review of Floral Shoppe), Dream Sequins is a vast pool of merchandised memories. It succeeds in portraying the ampulosity of induced nostalgia, melting it away inside the cloying hyperreal fabric of a REM-inducing microwave. Half-dream, half-nightmare: same as in any altered state of consciousness. And yet not quite the same. Nothing is ever the same.
As for the rigurously musical, the most noticeable differences which set Dream Sequins apart to a grade where it could even be considered an experimental ambient album are: its focus on drones (specially on the second half, where rhythmic sections succumb to a, so to speak, white noise), its distinctive and scattered use of samples, its playful, all-over-the-place switches in time signatures, its obsessive detail to layering, its lush, rich and at times hand-crafted instrumentation, the list could go on. The whole length of the album is packed with moments of brilliancy: subtle echoes (samples, whether anthropomorphic or not), drums or synths in waves dispersed in a breathing cloud of pure unpredictability, indetermination and formlessness which operates as a framework for experimental improvisation; the transition between passages is abrupt and unnatural precisely to recreate the consciousness’ discontinuous style of pacing, eliciting in a subject the cognition that time is not merely non-existent but folding upon himself. Despite its lack of rhythmic cohesion, the cassette (yes, talk about niche, it is actually being sold in the form of a cassette) could be split in two halfs, not only in terms of music but it must be noted that Dream Sequins® attract a sort of narrative to its minutes of runtime, if disperse or unfathomable: whereas in the first songs jamming is everpresent, with energetic 80s-recycled drums (Climbing the Corporate Ladder), the second half, marked by a diaphanous transition, is where Dream Sequins® ''loses its ***'', to put it in a colloquial way of speaking. Long, wide New Age-y drone sections are incorporated, as dopamine levels fall down to minimum and disconnection with normal consciousness is finally realized. Out of the blue, the journey is cooled down in a plateau of suspension as hyper-accelerated mindscapes give up to ego-death: a mind-melting drone of a thousand voices slowed down; what was once curling has now transformed into a flat humming; a stroke of a harp, or that of a mandolin, or a voice footage remarkably emerges to sink once again in the lake of amniotic noise. Dream Sequins® is a place where things, albeit acutely ephemeral, are never quite dead. Under the psychoactive effects of Dream Sequins®, eternity is lived as a terrifying experience, trippy and decomposing.
Complex, innovative and terribly actual, Dream Sequins stands a step further in ambition and experimentation than Nmesh’ prior release, Nu.Wav Hallucinations. It is also possibly the best vaporwave album conceived as of yet. If you don’t mind taking a peak at the abyss neither getting your antennae impregnated in its septic radiance, Dream Sequins® is definitively one of the most interesting experimental releases to come out in the year 2014 of our post-internet, post-reality, post-post-modern era. Buy Dream Sequins®, for a fair price of 8.00$. Nmesh, exploring the regions of experience.
