With a quiet intensity over the last 12 years, Strategy has proven himself to be an incredibly resourceful and rewarding musician in both group settings and as a solo artist. In the latter guise, this Portland producer/multi-instrumentalist (aka Paul Dickow) has released a prolific amount of excellent work for quality indie labels such as Kranky, Orac, 100% Silk, Endless Flight, and Entr'acte, putting a cerebral yet sensual spin on dub, ambient, post rock, and house music. 

For his Further Records debut, Noise Tape Self, Strategy delves ever deeper into his more ambient inclinations and experiments with tape loops. Most of the six tracks bear titles more suited for a library record, but Noise Tape Self lacks library music's faceless functionality; rather, it's an immersive soundtrack to stimulating one's imagination or losing one's bearings. Dickow says he became obsessed with making tape music in 2008, after tiring of using the computer as his main instrument. Fellow Portland producer/ingenious gear-tinkerer David Chandler (Solenoid) taught Dickow “how to make a tape loop that could be put inside a cassette tape. I got really into this, and got a 4 track, knowing this would allow me to have four synchronized loops per tape. I would then run each channel through a series of effects and 'perform' live mixes using the loops. I alternated between using source material of my own devising and using whatever source material happened to be on the cassettes I was hacking.” 

Noise Tape Self kicks off with “Awesome Piano,” in which a fragment of a beautiful piano motif gets overwhelmed by a glorious vortex of static and distortion. We're immediately submerged in Strategy's alluring and disorienting world, where rupture and rapture converge. “Cassette Loop” is a gorgeous ambient piece with a lulling, aquatic quality that recalls such masters of uneasy listening as Rapoon, O Yuki Conjugate, and Aube. The self-descriptive “Ominous Lovely Piano” is a ghostly, microcosmic form of dub, an ultimate kind of headphone music of deep psychedelic interiority that's reminiscent of Paul Schütze's 1996 masterpiece, Apart. The hypnotic/amniotic ambience of “Lovely Loop” whispers of a peaceful eternity; this track could be an important step toward a new, improved strain of New Age. The album closes with “Rhen's Loop”; here's where the album really soars into the stratosphere and grows surreal wings. A five-dimensional headfuck of what sounds like analog-synth growls and whirs and desolate drones, “Rhen's Loop” is Doppler effected and disorienting, like a more somber take on Conrad Schnitzler's Ballet Statique. With Noise Tape Self, Strategy has found a way to build works of compelling, intimate grandeur with some of the humblest of sonic atoms. It's an alchemical wonder.

Strategy - Noise Tape Self

Do you ever listen to a record and worry about its creator's sanity? Granted, it rarely happens, but in the case of Innercity—Antwerp producer Hans Dens—it's a legitimate concern. Thankfully, Dens' seeming madness manifests itself in music so uncompromising and off the charts of classification, it convinces you that any kind of sonic innovation at this late date demands a bit of mental instability. By way of explanation, Dens says, “People forget that there is only magic in this world, mostly black, nothing more.” In other news: You will never confuse this Innercity with Kevin Saunderson's Inner City. 

ABABABABABABAS (Blue Lion Child) makes Dens' rather strange first album on Further, 2012's A Lion's Baptism, seem like radio-friendly fodder by comparison. The producer admits, “This release is surely one of my harsher, bleak ones... I tried to keep it pure, and again bleak. Also put the keyboards in the shelf for this one; it's all guitar and violin through an array of effects...” “BAAL'S (KITTEN TRUMPETEER CHOIR)” fades in with what sounds like waves of harsh, scalding feedback—let's call it “the black metal of ambient.” Dens conjures pitiless, post-apocalyptic atmospheres, but imbues them with a residual glow of dignity. The tidal “MASKS AND MOLD MATTER” could be a noir soundtrack that's too weird and nightmarish even for David Lynch. Its main sound source sounds like the irradiated molecules of a psych-rock guitar riff by Chrome's Helios Creed. What passes for a respite in Innercity's harsh sonic universe comes from “RARAGRAMS,” whose ill oscillations seemingly escaped from Gil Mellé's groundbreaking Andromeda Strain soundtrack. You sense that something very bad and unfathomable is happening in the distance. 

On “IN ABRA AND UMBRA,” Dens creates a desolate Plutonian ambience that'll give your ears frostbite, unleashing clouds of unidentified frying sonics. With perverse whimsy, Dens lets some unfeasibly heavy beats intrude in the last minute. “A-BABA-AL-ONE” defines a new form of chilling horror-film soundtrack; its synths actually shiver and moan. The album closes with “AND DEAD AS ALL BLACK ACTS,” which sounds like a yeti trying to pound its way out of a casket. Anguished tones of unclassifiable extremity and distress send us out on a note of ecstatic bafflement. You realize you've reached the end of this record alive, and you're much stronger because of it.

ABABABABABABAS (Blue Lion Child)

Nautil - Canopée

Mosam Howieson - Spirals

In April of this year, Donato Dozzy took a set of mouth harps back to his parent’s house in the Italian countryside and set about exploring the possibilities of that most basic of instruments. The mouth harp had been calling to Dozzy ever since childhood, when he had discovered the “marranzano” on a holiday in Sicily with this parents at the tail end of the 1970s. Almost four decades later, Dozzy had begun to see in this peculiar, ancient sound, the roots of the music he’d been making and playing in clubs all these years. It was time to find out how far he could trace it all back. 

The Loud Silence is the result of those explorations, an accompanied deep-dive into childhood memory, social history and the roots of psychedelia. Recorded indoors and outdoors, half-way up mountains and on the edge of the Mediterranean sea, the record is meditative but also powerful. Dozzy has distilled his ideas into an incredibly intimate sound, one that invites an inverted sort of exploration, pushing you further and further into your own head. Each track maintains an inviolable central pulse, while delicate, fluttering sounds hint at vast spaces that might open up at any minute - they’re just waiting for you to connect with them. Field recordings hover below the resonating harps, adding to the mysterious atmosphere. Tracks like ‘The Loud Silence’ and ‘Downhill to the Sea’ are wrapped up in simple rhythms, their strict throb drawing you deeper and deeper into the primitive sound. 

Where so much of today’s trance-inducing music is mechanical, born of grids and microchips, The Loud Silence pulses with the presence of the human body. As Dozzy says, “The hand gives the tempo, together with the breath.” It’s all about the mouth, the ears, the hands. The organic physicality of the sound, made in concert with the body itself, generates a primal response in the listener, an undeniably visceral understanding, an empathetic resonance. “When you play such an instrument, you'll feel all your bones vibrating to the sound in a sort of chain reaction!” says Dozzy. "It becomes an emotional and physical clean up. In Italy, one of the ways to call the jew's harp is 'scacciapensieri', which literally means 'It kicks thoughts away'". 

The sound and its effects also carry with them a sense of history, of community and of social ritual. Trance states, whether shamanic rituals in the Amazon or DJ sets in dark night-clubs, have always relied on a social element, a communal understanding of what is going on, what is expected to happen. The Loud Silence is a personal album that speaks to this communal experience, that wonders implicitly why these ancient ideas of society and community have been so devalued today. “In a moment where all individuals seem to act egoistically and not as a tribe,” says Dozzy, “This music gives me the sense of continuity with the past.” 

Throughout history, states of altered consciousness have been religious, political, poetical or nihilistic, but rarely ever just a means of innocent entertainment. There is something inherently transgressive about removing the shackles of individual will and succumbing to something larger than yourself. Giving up your base desires and ambitions in favour of a sound, to submit yourself to something as simple and fleeting as vibrations in the air, the sound of some metal resonating in another person’s mouth, is a way to communicate with the part of you which is in everyone else too. It’s a way to reach both in and out at once, to the heart of what it is to be human on this planet. At a time when nations are burning and whole continents are on the edge of breaking apart, recognising the bonds that bring and hold people together, recognising that what we share is what truly defines us, couldn’t be more important. 

Donato Dozzy - The Loud Silence

Helping listeners to escape reality—which has been known to grate, on occasion—has long been a noble aim of many musicians. One of the most effective ways to do that is to create imaginary soundtracks for impossible science-fiction films, the darker and more un-Hollywood-like, the better. Another method is to take inspiration from great works of architecture—which, as Goethe cogently noted, “is frozen music.” The latter route is used by Brooklyn producer Jonas Reinhardt (aka Jesse Reiner) on his sixth album, Palace Savant. 

Reiner undergoes a profound solo odyssey on this album. Palace Savant may be the most spectacular realization of Jonas Reinhardt's outward-bound sonic aspirations. These eight tracks draw on 14th-century architect Peter Parler's breath-taking St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague. “St. Vitus is a statement to the future by the rulers at the time,” Reiner says. “It's surreal, grandiose, psychedelic—and the sheer scale of human ambition involved is almost beyond comprehension.” Parler reportedly deviated from the cathedral's initial blueprint and elevated the Gothic style to heretofore unimagined, bizarre levels. With Palace Savant, Reiner projected Parler's handiwork to Thomas Edison's era of electricity. “I envisioned [Parler] retrofitting his cathedral with excesses of incandescent light, preparing for a coming age of electronics. Palace Savant is what a contemporary electronic performance in that space might sound like.” 

Recorded on tour and in New York over the course of a year and mixed at Transmitter Park Studio in Greenpoint, Palace Savant begins with the instant attention-grabber/pulse-accelerator “Old Kaizen.” At once claustrophobic and spacious, it possesses an urgent, chase-scene synth throb that would make John Carpenter or Bernard Fevre jealous. The turbulent “Remains Of Orr” sounds like Edgar Froese's kosmische-ambient masterpiece Aqua tossed into shark-infested waters. On “Androma,” Reiner's expertly modulated arpeggios contrast low and high frequencies, revealing his ability to create suspense with a chiaroscuro of whirs and pulsations. 

Palace Savant achieves two towering peaks. The first is “Go Sceptre Go,” a swiftly moving, heavenly droner that veers off on a tangent into a much darker, more chaotic direction. The second is “Noctornum,” a burbling and soaring piece that's at once aquatic and astral, before an emphatic rhythm forms, pushing things into menacing Szajner-esque territory. The album closes with the midtempo arpeggios and muted, wailing siren tones of “Omat Principle Decay,” a moving finale to a record that's taken you so far and tingled your senses so intensely. A high point in Jonas Reinhardt's large canon, the dramatic and majestic Palace Savant does exquisite justice to St. Vitus Cathedral's grandeur.

Jonas Reinhardt - Palace Savant

Some records just barely nudge your consciousness, but they do so in such an intriguing manner that their tentativeness and ephemerality lure you in deeper than you expect. Such is the case with Overflow Pool by Mogador, a new project by Will Long. This prolific producer—who is best known for his profoundly meditative ambient music under the name Celer—favors the long-form, beatless approach to composition, as he lets his rigorously honed tones unspool with a gentle insistence. 

Overflow Pool consists of three lengthy pieces full of lingering, aqueous chords that are spaced out by suspenseful lacunae. Each piece revolves around episodes of briskly struck piano chord clusters that are left to decay to near silence, for maximal contemplativeness. These are followed by a lower-keyed retort, as if to ground the listener and to keep her from getting overly optimistic from the preceding burst of Harold Budd-on-uppers tones. Similarities to Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon are also evident, as Mogador methodically doles out morsels of oceanic calm geared to align your chakras like some 21st-century Stephen Halpern LP. It sounds ideal for flotation tanks, deep-tissue massages, and general relaxation. 

Long observes that Mogador differs from his Celer output “because it's completely unprocessed. This is a pure room recording with no extra effects; only piano and reel-to-reel delay.” The Yokohama, Japan-based musician says that his primary aim with Overflow Pool “was to make something that doesn't happen all the time—it's so sparse, that it blends into the room. It happens so seldom that it's easy to forget about. You just catch it here and there. That's the feeling I wanted.” It's a feeling that's all too rare in modern music—peacefulness without sentimentality.

Rhodes Mk V, Uher Universal 5000, Sony Tapecorder TC­108 by Will Long 
Recorded in Tokyo, December 2013 
Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin 
Artwork by Nao Watahiki

Mogador - Overflow Pool

Human Rays—Stockholm, Sweden producer Robin Smeds Mattila—says that the music on A Tension was made during nocturnal sessions in a studio full of mostly cheap analog and digital gear, all in one take. “I kind of let the mood guide me and just go with it,” he says. The result is a gripping four-track suite of emotionally charged minimal ambient that was created quickly but sounds like it was rigorously sweated over for many weeks. After a handful of releases that explored noisy, quasi-industrial techno, Mattila here deviates into a more abstract, melancholy mode with A Tension. His creative process involves experimenting “to see how far I can push a sound with a pretty lo-fi setup. Improvisation and limitations are part of the thing that makes it interesting.” 

This approach yields riveting dividends right from the start on A Tension. On “Condensity,” the sparse pinging and distant, muted beats commingle with what sounds like rough wind or waves, hinting at the Arctic vibes that Biosphere conjured on Substrata. It's at once chill and chilling, tranquil and unsettling. “Between The Hours” places spindly, woody beats beneath a dramatic sweep of synthetic strings, ebbing and flowing like Fripp & Eno's monumental “An Index Of Metals.” “Neverendless” might be even more redolent of the North Pole than “Condensity,” its severely minimal isolationist ambience suggesting Mick Harris' none-more-cold Lull or Thomas Köner's Permafrost. On “Manual Litany I,” Mattila takes what sounds like a sentimental synth melody and smears it into a mantra of compelling drudgery. He notes that the track draws inspiration from William Basinski, who's famous for his series of profoundly poignant Disintegration Loops albums. “It's an attempt at making an organic loop, so it's just me playing the same thing over and over on a synthesizer and letting the mistakes become part of the composition together with just playing around with an effects processor.” 

From these simple, humble means, Mattila forges a record that triggers subtle, intricate feelings. A Tension is that rare kind of music that freezes out all extraneous stimuli and submerges you in a frigid netherworld in which calm and disquiet exist in iced-out harmony.

Human Rays - A Tension

Monadh ‎– Muara

Rrose has found her own niche in the American techno underground. Her hypnotic tracks incorporate ideas from ambient and minimalist music as prominently as they do the history of dance music, operating in the same fruitful cross-section between techno and the abstract as many other Further Records releases. Rrose’s debt to experimental music has never been more obvious than on September 20, 2012, when he performed James Tenney's "Having Never Written A Note For Percussion" live in Washington, DC. The simple yet colossal piece is one of that American composer's most famous works, requiring the performer to play one percussive instrument constantly, taking it from the quietest point to the loudest and back again. Done well, it's a fascinating exploration of tone, volume and decay, and a showcase for drone music's unusually transportive powers. 

"Never Having Written A Note For Percussion" has always been a personal favourite of Rrose's. He was struck with the inspiration to try it out after touring a disused trolley tunnel beneath downtown DC, where the possibilities of "seemingly endless and unpredictable reverberations" seemed like the perfect environment for Tenney's composition. He made a 32-inch gong played with two mallets the central device of his performance, creating a towering leviathan of sound capable of the softest highs and the deepest lows. It’s a vastness that comes across especially well on the live recording of that 2012 performance, a breathtaking 30 minutes that seems daunting at first but moves with a grace as easy as breathing in and out. 

What makes Rrose's take almost definitive is not only does he stretch out the piece to 30 minutes beyond its usual 8-12 minute duration, but even more importantly she offers two versions made in two very different settings. The A-side of the 12-inch features a performance recorded in a studio during his practice sessions. Dry and mic’d up close, its almost stuffy quality is the direct opposite of the live version, like it’s coming from inside your head where the live-recording B-side surrounds you with the booming sound of the gong. That duality makes for a valuable insight into the power of Tenney’s original composition and its wide-open potential for interpretation. "Never Having Written A Note For Percussion" is a powerful study not only in minimalist composition but the importance of the room and environment that a performance, or just pure sound, takes place in, and a potent example of the kind of experimental tendencies that make Rrose one of techno’s more fascinating figures.

Rrose plays James Tenney - Having Never Written a Note for Percussion

Rrose has found her own niche in the American techno underground. Her hypnotic tracks incorporate ideas from ambient and minimalist music as prominently as they do the history of dance music, operating in the same fruitful cross-section between techno and the abstract as many other Further Records releases. Rrose’s debt to experimental music has never been more obvious than on September 20, 2012, when he performed James Tenney's "Having Never Written A Note For Percussion" live in Washington, DC. The simple yet colossal piece is one of that American composer's most famous works, requiring the performer to play one percussive instrument constantly, taking it from the quietest point to the loudest and back again. Done well, it's a fascinating exploration of tone, volume and decay, and a showcase for drone music's unusually transportive powers. 

"Never Having Written A Note For Percussion" has always been a personal favourite of Rrose's. He was struck with the inspiration to try it out after touring a disused trolley tunnel beneath downtown DC, where the possibilities of "seemingly endless and unpredictable reverberations" seemed like the perfect environment for Tenney's composition. He made a 32-inch gong played with two mallets the central device of his performance, creating a towering leviathan of sound capable of the softest highs and the deepest lows. It’s a vastness that comes across especially well on the live recording of that 2012 performance, a breathtaking 30 minutes that seems daunting at first but moves with a grace as easy as breathing in and out. 

What makes Rrose's take almost definitive is not only does he stretch out the piece to 30 minutes beyond its usual 8-12 minute duration, but even more importantly she offers two versions made in two very different settings. The A-side of the 12-inch features a performance recorded in a studio during his practice sessions. Dry and mic’d up close, its almost stuffy quality is the direct opposite of the live version, like it’s coming from inside your head where the live-recording B-side surrounds you with the booming sound of the gong. That duality makes for a valuable insight into the power of Tenney’s original composition and its wide-open potential for interpretation. "Never Having Written A Note For Percussion" is a powerful study not only in minimalist composition but the importance of the room and environment that a performance, or just pure sound, takes place in, and a potent example of the kind of experimental tendencies that make Rrose one of techno’s more fascinating figures.

Having Never Written a Note for Percussion (Live at Dupont Underground)

Having Never Written a Note for Percussion (Studio Version)

With a quiet intensity over the last 12 years, Strategy has proven himself to be an incredibly resourceful and rewarding musician in both group settings and as a solo artist. In the latter guise, this Portland producer/multi-instrumentalist (aka Paul Dickow) has released a prolific amount of excellent work for quality indie labels such as Kranky, Orac, 100% Silk, Endless Flight, and Entr'acte, putting a cerebral yet sensual spin on dub, ambient, post rock, and house music. 

For his Further Records debut, Noise Tape Self, Strategy delves ever deeper into his more ambient inclinations and experiments with tape loops. Most of the six tracks bear titles more suited for a library record, but Noise Tape Self lacks library music's faceless functionality; rather, it's an immersive soundtrack to stimulating one's imagination or losing one's bearings. Dickow says he became obsessed with making tape music in 2008, after tiring of using the computer as his main instrument. Fellow Portland producer/ingenious gear-tinkerer David Chandler (Solenoid) taught Dickow “how to make a tape loop that could be put inside a cassette tape. I got really into this, and got a 4 track, knowing this would allow me to have four synchronized loops per tape. I would then run each channel through a series of effects and 'perform' live mixes using the loops. I alternated between using source material of my own devising and using whatever source material happened to be on the cassettes I was hacking.” 

Noise Tape Self kicks off with “Awesome Piano,” in which a fragment of a beautiful piano motif gets overwhelmed by a glorious vortex of static and distortion. We're immediately submerged in Strategy's alluring and disorienting world, where rupture and rapture converge. “Cassette Loop” is a gorgeous ambient piece with a lulling, aquatic quality that recalls such masters of uneasy listening as Rapoon, O Yuki Conjugate, and Aube. The self-descriptive “Ominous Lovely Piano” is a ghostly, microcosmic form of dub, an ultimate kind of headphone music of deep psychedelic interiority that's reminiscent of Paul Schütze's 1996 masterpiece, Apart. The hypnotic/amniotic ambience of “Lovely Loop” whispers of a peaceful eternity; this track could be an important step toward a new, improved strain of New Age. The album closes with “Rhen's Loop”; here's where the album really soars into the stratosphere and grows surreal wings. A five-dimensional headfuck of what sounds like analog-synth growls and whirs and desolate drones, “Rhen's Loop” is Doppler effected and disorienting, like a more somber take on Conrad Schnitzler's Ballet Statique. With Noise Tape Self, Strategy has found a way to build works of compelling, intimate grandeur with some of the humblest of sonic atoms. It's an alchemical wonder.

Ominous Lovely Piano

Cassette Loop

Awesome Piano

Hobgoblin

Lovely Loop

Do you ever listen to a record and worry about its creator's sanity? Granted, it rarely happens, but in the case of Innercity—Antwerp producer Hans Dens—it's a legitimate concern. Thankfully, Dens' seeming madness manifests itself in music so uncompromising and off the charts of classification, it convinces you that any kind of sonic innovation at this late date demands a bit of mental instability. By way of explanation, Dens says, “People forget that there is only magic in this world, mostly black, nothing more.” In other news: You will never confuse this Innercity with Kevin Saunderson's Inner City. 

ABABABABABABAS (Blue Lion Child) makes Dens' rather strange first album on Further, 2012's A Lion's Baptism, seem like radio-friendly fodder by comparison. The producer admits, “This release is surely one of my harsher, bleak ones... I tried to keep it pure, and again bleak. Also put the keyboards in the shelf for this one; it's all guitar and violin through an array of effects...” “BAAL'S (KITTEN TRUMPETEER CHOIR)” fades in with what sounds like waves of harsh, scalding feedback—let's call it “the black metal of ambient.” Dens conjures pitiless, post-apocalyptic atmospheres, but imbues them with a residual glow of dignity. The tidal “MASKS AND MOLD MATTER” could be a noir soundtrack that's too weird and nightmarish even for David Lynch. Its main sound source sounds like the irradiated molecules of a psych-rock guitar riff by Chrome's Helios Creed. What passes for a respite in Innercity's harsh sonic universe comes from “RARAGRAMS,” whose ill oscillations seemingly escaped from Gil Mellé's groundbreaking Andromeda Strain soundtrack. You sense that something very bad and unfathomable is happening in the distance. 

On “IN ABRA AND UMBRA,” Dens creates a desolate Plutonian ambience that'll give your ears frostbite, unleashing clouds of unidentified frying sonics. With perverse whimsy, Dens lets some unfeasibly heavy beats intrude in the last minute. “A-BABA-AL-ONE” defines a new form of chilling horror-film soundtrack; its synths actually shiver and moan. The album closes with “AND DEAD AS ALL BLACK ACTS,” which sounds like a yeti trying to pound its way out of a casket. Anguished tones of unclassifiable extremity and distress send us out on a note of ecstatic bafflement. You realize you've reached the end of this record alive, and you're much stronger because of it.

In Abra And Umbra

Barks (mega, omega and magi)

Raragrams

Masks And Mold Matter

Baal's (Kitten Trumpeteer Choir)

Galdae

Canopée

Spiral 3

Spiral 4

Spiral 7

In April of this year, Donato Dozzy took a set of mouth harps back to his parent’s house in the Italian countryside and set about exploring the possibilities of that most basic of instruments. The mouth harp had been calling to Dozzy ever since childhood, when he had discovered the “marranzano” on a holiday in Sicily with this parents at the tail end of the 1970s. Almost four decades later, Dozzy had begun to see in this peculiar, ancient sound, the roots of the music he’d been making and playing in clubs all these years. It was time to find out how far he could trace it all back. 

The Loud Silence is the result of those explorations, an accompanied deep-dive into childhood memory, social history and the roots of psychedelia. Recorded indoors and outdoors, half-way up mountains and on the edge of the Mediterranean sea, the record is meditative but also powerful. Dozzy has distilled his ideas into an incredibly intimate sound, one that invites an inverted sort of exploration, pushing you further and further into your own head. Each track maintains an inviolable central pulse, while delicate, fluttering sounds hint at vast spaces that might open up at any minute - they’re just waiting for you to connect with them. Field recordings hover below the resonating harps, adding to the mysterious atmosphere. Tracks like ‘The Loud Silence’ and ‘Downhill to the Sea’ are wrapped up in simple rhythms, their strict throb drawing you deeper and deeper into the primitive sound. 

Where so much of today’s trance-inducing music is mechanical, born of grids and microchips, The Loud Silence pulses with the presence of the human body. As Dozzy says, “The hand gives the tempo, together with the breath.” It’s all about the mouth, the ears, the hands. The organic physicality of the sound, made in concert with the body itself, generates a primal response in the listener, an undeniably visceral understanding, an empathetic resonance. “When you play such an instrument, you'll feel all your bones vibrating to the sound in a sort of chain reaction!” says Dozzy. "It becomes an emotional and physical clean up. In Italy, one of the ways to call the jew's harp is 'scacciapensieri', which literally means 'It kicks thoughts away'". 

The sound and its effects also carry with them a sense of history, of community and of social ritual. Trance states, whether shamanic rituals in the Amazon or DJ sets in dark night-clubs, have always relied on a social element, a communal understanding of what is going on, what is expected to happen. The Loud Silence is a personal album that speaks to this communal experience, that wonders implicitly why these ancient ideas of society and community have been so devalued today. “In a moment where all individuals seem to act egoistically and not as a tribe,” says Dozzy, “This music gives me the sense of continuity with the past.” 

Throughout history, states of altered consciousness have been religious, political, poetical or nihilistic, but rarely ever just a means of innocent entertainment. There is something inherently transgressive about removing the shackles of individual will and succumbing to something larger than yourself. Giving up your base desires and ambitions in favour of a sound, to submit yourself to something as simple and fleeting as vibrations in the air, the sound of some metal resonating in another person’s mouth, is a way to communicate with the part of you which is in everyone else too. It’s a way to reach both in and out at once, to the heart of what it is to be human on this planet. At a time when nations are burning and whole continents are on the edge of breaking apart, recognising the bonds that bring and hold people together, recognising that what we share is what truly defines us, couldn’t be more important. 

Albums by Further Records