Dysmorphik "Everything Else" (2005)

 

Everything Else is no official release but an amalgamation of experiments, unfinished works and remixes from my personal collection of MP3s, scraped from websites long gone. Dysmorphik has been a personal gem for many years. With my recent covering of ...And To The Republic and Tick, Screech And Halt, I also decided to upload all the music to Bandcamp for others to enjoy. I cannot express how much fun and strange emotional experiences this unique sound has brought me. This post serves as a reminder to check out the aforementioned albums, both in my words and on the Bandcamp page as you can now hear them and this assortment of additional songs.

Kicking off with Nubile, we get the formation of ideas which fail to spark into a bigger picture, it serves well as an intro track being a minute long. Fractures of melody give way to the thumping cascade of obnoxious drum kicks and weakened sirens. The later extended version gives insight to the layering of fuzzy static noise and expansion of the song into a Gabber nightmare of dirty bass pummeling and gritty stacks of mechanical interference. The noise aspect of this sound is expanded on Effects, likely a jam track of experimentation that gives insight into how much of this madness is derived from experimentation. Meat N Static bridges that motif, blossoming with structure and concept as an abrasiveness set of sounds are driven forth with bombastic intensity. The noisescape twists and shifts intermittently, finding sporadic bursts of striking groove between its uncomfortable respites.

The five minute song Penetrate Your Pain comes in two forms with the superior second iteration revealing the craft and care involved. With this electronic music being spat out by the computer, one can hear the identical notes, drum patterns and even spurious noises from the VSTs having their knobs and dials tweaked in pursuit of perfection. Its been a favorite of mine but always felt like a human voice was missing. The remixes have other musicians hands over Dysmorphik's music and consequently doesn't yield much of my interest. If your curious in anyway about this mad, dystopian, alien hybrid of Noise and Industrial then these extras are worth a bit of your time.

Rating: 5/10

Dysmorphik "...And To The Republic" (2004)

 

 Following up on yesterdays post about Tick, Burn, Screech & Halt we have the second installment by this wonderfully peculiar musician of personal interest to me. Released five years later, ...And To The Republic is a force of musical maturity. The bizarre machination of Industrial noise harps on with refined execution. Along with a developed approach to songwriting and structure, these inspirations have evolved with passion, vision and agility. Its often through the lens of Dance and Electronic Body Music, along with a better mastery of composition and sound design.

Where his previous songs where disjointed, awkward and unusual, Dysmorphik channels the wall of noises with a newly found cohesion that is dense and engulfing. Between slabs of synth and protruding electronic melodies, distortions, zaps, whirls, fuzzes and clicks rattle around in a persuasive madness. Everything hits harder. The percussion slams with drive and groove, hitting these dance floor strides of pace fit for a Cyber Goth club. The key melodies, emerging from alien saw waves and trance-like synths, are catchy and grooving. Even the vocals have "leved up". Still leaning on the whispering edge of softly aggression, a use of subtle distortion and plugin effects deliver a far better front, now powerful and melded to the mix like another instrument.

The sound design is fantastic! Giving the density your attention, its details offer up so much more to these massive songs. Its less obvious as to what is going on, as if hours of experimental sound manipulation has its its best recorded moments plucked out and injected into the music like a Bomb Squad production. This lends the song structures to more break away moments, much like the sudden shift of break-beats, the music derails on brief tangents of magical noise madness, often driven by slamming percussion that thuds and crunches hard. Its a dystopian pleasure!

It would be so hard to pluck a favorite from all these numbers but Idle Dereliction has this wonderful progression as a song. Starting off with a dense pummeling of Industrial groove from its drum patterns, the flexing baseline hooks one in as the tapestry of noises grows. Hard hitting synths force the issue and before long the dense arrangements shift towards an emotional axis. It wrestles back and forth with these fantastically performed lyrics pushing of from the "make love like suicide" line. The wall of sound is utterly engrossing, beautifully alien and its steady deconstruction reveals this underpinning of choral voices... its so dark and wonderful.

There are more songs in the arsenal beyond this release. A couple of experiments in pure Noise and Gabber style electronic music seemed like a fascinating evolution, a sort of boiled down experiment, the tapestry of gritty noise without the songs worked around them. Whatever the reason this musician had to end it all here around in the mid naughties is a mystery. It sounded like they were on the cusp of another evolution yet what they have left behind has memorized me to this day. Dysmorphik holds a special place in my heart. It is not with every song they strike gold but when it works its unlike anything else out there. Truly a forgotten treasure.

Rating: 8/10

Dysmorphik "Tick, Burn, Screech & Halt" (1999)

 

To write of Dysmorphik is to tease a treasure lost to the Internet's youth, years before the current perceived permanence of data. I discovered this Industrial musician through online communes, an early form of social media where artists where talking direct and giving their music away for free through MP3 sharing websites long dead. I had a collection of about twenty tracks obtained in my youth and a few years back managed to contact the man himself. He graciously sent me the missing songs from the only two albums before vanishing into a puff of smoke, with all traces of his peculiar art disappearing online, possibly forever! Many of these songs have been burned into my mind, occupying a strange space no other artist can get close to. Its survived the years, stitched to my painful youth and growth out from that darkness.

Tick, Burn, Screech & Halt is an amateurish debut, a wonderful cascade of obtuse noises, smashed and molded into an broken heap of sound. In that wreckage, something spectacular lurks. Its dystopian, alien and difficult. As far as Industrial music goes, this has many of the common hallmarks, yet the end result feels oddly different. A downtrodden voice broods between the cracks of melodies, rhythms and slabs of sound crammed together with force. These songs are an ugly mess birthed from beautiful intentions of expression. In that is a magic not often heard.

Most these tracks consist of several layers. Rattling, gritty and stiff percussive grooves get wedged between slabs of Industrial noise distortion. Airy synths lurk in the distance, softly groaning with unease, shaping a mood. Around them a calamity of stabbing synths, wobbling basslines, strikes and crashes prod and poke into the mix with a mechanical madness. The voicing that get sliced in are often of that whispering, shadowy variety. When reaching to hold a note its charm is solely in the attempt.

So much of this music feels machine like, disjointed, disconnected and strange but through the awkward cohesion certain instruments emanate the intention. Through its friction and unease the music pours out a vision that takes some time to hear. When I was young I lapped up having something odd and interesting to listen to for free. Then missing songs decades later, it took far longer to fall for them. With time they shape up into odd hashes of vision and aesthetic that dominates its own peculiar space.

 

Sometimes it is obvious which instruments are pushing the narrative but in its better songs your never quite sure. Giving ones attention to the barrage of noises, brimming with subtle zaps and whirls in its arsenal of synths, you can get lost in the detail. The colliding sounds and friction rub all over each other and yet through that spurious mess something enigmatic, dark and curious washes over with a spell. Much of this praise, however, should be reserved for the following release. That is where things get exceptional. At this stage the amateurish execution shows its nature and influences, reaching back to Synth-Pop in certain moments too. It is still a wonderful mess, unlike anything else Ive heard since.

Rating: 7/10