Review Summary: Putting the retch in wretched / haunt me, haunt me, do it again.
Emetophobia - Emetophobia is a phobia that causes overwhelming, intense anxiety pertaining to vomiting. This specific phobia can also include subcategories of what causes the anxiety, including a fear of vomiting in public, a fear of seeing vomit, a fear of watching the action of vomiting or fear of being nauseated.
The Gag File is, first things first, an entendre, a way of rendering Dilloway’s new album -- his first album proper in 3 years, his first album pivotal since 2012’s Modern Jester -- contiguous with the latter. “It’s all a gag, a joke” says the faux-ironist, throwing up his hands in mock surrender. “It doesn’t mean anything” offers the nihilist. But underneath is that word, the centrepiece, “gag”, voted the most unpleasant sound to human ears in a BBC poll partly because, due to an evolutionary safeguard, vomiting is contagious. Many people are genuinely terrified of the sound, myself among them. I read somewhere that the editor of the Atlantic is emetophobic and carries around a sick-bag with him everywhere, refuses to fly. Photos from his wedding, when he suffered an acute bout, show him sheening with sweat, pale, gaunt, looking more resuscitated corpse than gleeful groom. Grotesque, of course, but no more grotesque than the sound of gagging because: jesus christ, is there anything more visceral?
This album, perhaps. What neuroses linger underneath the veneer, the porch, the bed? What terror exists beyond the stiff-upper-lip, attempts at rational thinking? This is the puzzle Dilloway offers, though his cryptic loops leave no easy answers.
Dilloway is a magician of sorts, transmorphing techniques of ‘minimalism’ and creating something maximal and overbearing out of them. His loops shimmer and disappear into thin air, but his blades, coruscatingly sharp, well they’re designed to penetrate human skin and the dove? The dove is dead.
Beginning with a fittingly phantasmal tape-looped voice scarred beyond recognition and weaving it into a pattern, the album plays with the ghoulish and the mundane through a thicket of noise. Karaoke with Cal and the stunning Inhuman Form Reflected, replete with jump-scares, and the most obviously monstrous candidates here, a Frankenstein of eldritch loops, decayed noise blasts and rickety incantations offered from a creaking chair. Essentially, it’s a lot of fun, but too ominous to be entirely unfrightening.
Dilloway has, however, forgone some of the murk and muck. This album to these ears seems the most polished, pristine and for lack of a better word hi-fi than his previous works, and by throwing the lo-fi approach out he throws his playfulness out with it. Which isn’t to say there’s not humour, if such a word can be used to describe instrumental music, evident on the album. In the album’s biggest volte-face, No Eye Sockets -- the song with the most ghoulish and unsettling title -- proves to be the most ordinary (or, in the context of the album, unusual) of the tracks. A collage of a night out at a 3-star hotel restaurant, inoffensive rock playing in the background as the laughter and enunciations and drunken exclamations of revellers is foregrounded, it operates on a similar level to Dancing in Tomellila, and while a beguiling track Dilloway’s lonely elitism shines through. Then we’re abruptly back: Switch, perhaps the album’s finest track, lurches and flounders it’s way through a propulsive power noise beat, never letting the rhythm settle into comfort. The closing track, too, is wonderful, recalling Modern Jester with a noisy, jarring loop whose sound is all Dilloway’s, ending with a crackled distorted voice.
I liked it when I heard it digitally and adored it when it arrived on vinyl -- it is one of those all-too-rare albums which impelled me to flip the record over and start from the beginning after my first listen, so beguiled was I, and I’ve rarely stopped listening to it since. While the vinyl tracklisting, split into A1-4 and B5-8, foregrounds expedience over experience -- I would much preferred the second side to start on No Eye Sockets to emphasise the juxtaposition and keep me guessing -- the occasional drifts into indulgence and puerility are more than made up for by the calibre of the loops and the cohesion of album as statement.
I haven’t figured The Gag File out yet, and in truth I doubt I will. Even its creator professes to have no idea what it’s about, aside from exorcising personal demons. But listen closer and beneath the noise there’s something broken, something out of place. The noise here is imposter, like the chucky doll posing on the cover, to the thing itself, which is fear -- will i be forgotten? Why can’t I join dinnergoers? And why can’t I keep going steadily, sans obstacles? And why, in gods name, is the sound of a drunken retch so viscerally revolting?
Regardless, this is some of the finest and thought-provoking tape music I’ve heard in some time. That I haven’t yet ‘cracked’ it adds to the appeal, and I eagerly anticipate poring over the abstrusions for months to come.
And, if nothing else: this is gonna sound good as hell connected to my doorbell on Halloween. Trick, treat?
Both.
