The salary, health care, and retirement accounts available in the field of reviewing music (which ranges from the indie\/mainstream to the almost unfathomably obscure) are fantastic, but many of us enjoy working 40+ hour per week jobs on top of it. Naturally, in workplace gab sessions, the subject of our super-hero identities as reviewers occasionally comes up. Once people have looked at the site, they usually ask the following: “So, what’s the (worst\/weirdest\/most memorable) thing you’ve reviewed?”
\nMy stock answer for “weirdest” album has long been Magali Babin’s Chemin de Fer, which consists almost entirely of the recorded sound of pieces of metal interacting with other pieces of metal. I actually kind of enjoyed Chemin de Fer, but I have listened to it maybe once since I reviewed it.
\nWith that in mind, I’m pleased and amazed to announce that I have a new winner in the “weird” category. I’ve experienced albums based on formless electronic noise before — but I’ve never heard one that was so decidedly listener-unfriendly. Kotra definitely has a vision, and it’s easy to see that Dissilient came out precisely as intended. It’s just hard to imagine why he has distributed copies of it to others.
\nIn addition to the fact that Dissilient consists entirely of sounds that most mainstream listeners would go out of their way to avoid hearing, it contains so little modulation, and such an apparent lack of purpose or structure, that it almost seems designed to put off adventurous listeners as well. The first two thirds of the disc (all tracks titled “Minus”) consists almost entirely of different interactions between an almost unchanging, high feedback tone and other, incidental noises. After the silent “Zero” track, the “Plus” tracks emerge, with a sonic palette that might sound richer, but only to ears already dulled by the earlier tracks. There are other, exceedingly minor variations, but the album closes in the same aggressively unvaried form in which it began.As some sort of experiment in audience provocation, Dissilient might be sort of interesting…but only to an observer in a soundproof booth.
\n— Brett McCallon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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