Catalog nr. arbitrary 06
arbitrary | Label/imprint and platform founded in 2014, run by Danish musician Mads Emil Nielsen.
arbitrary publishes graphic scores, prints, a curated mix / assemblage series and electronic & electroacoustic recordings on various formats.
The editions are distributed to music / book shops, galleries and mailorder services in Germany, US, DK, Japan and elsewhere.
www.arbitraryproject.com
info@arbitraryproject.com
rack it
technology
disco dictionary
After Denseland’s two last releases Chunk (Mosz 2009) and Lilke,Likes, Like (m=minimal 2013) Denseland’s new album Disco Dictionary straddles the borders between funk and post punk, experimental avant-garde and fractured down tempo techno, electronica and minimalist industrial. Formed in 2008 by long time Berlin musician’s bassist Hannes Strobl, percussionist Hanno Leichtmann and avant-garde vocalist David Moss, Denseland as a three headed ensemble jumps genres, timbres and times.
Listening evokes shades of bygone music’s and not: rhythm emulations of Joy Division, the B 52´s and ESG, the extended vocal madness of Roy Hart and Laurie Anderson, the distortions of the early Contortions, reduced baselines of Grandmaster Flash and John Carpenter.
But Denseland’s sound also exists in its own sealed universe – one spanned by sinister timbres of seduction, grooves of foreboding imbued with a sardonic, almost wicked humor. The tracks lure the listener in through an incessant, underlying, looping drive; a forwards moving groove and throbbing pulse that both pushes back and ensnares you simultaneously. Under its crystalline surface, Denseland’s music reveals contradictory undercurrents – unsettling noise, weird breaks, ominous drones, grinding distortion, disjointed electronic pulses, fractured beats, disfigured sounds.
Pervading all of Denseland’s tracks is the omnipresence of Moss’s virtuosic, Sprechgesang voice – cutting through, scratching, crawling over Strobl and Leichtmann’s rhythmical textures, continually evoking images of a disjointed perceiving body, gradually disappearing like in a Samuel Beckett play.
Denseland’s music turns the listener an unsettled sound universe conceived as strange landscape and magnetic atmosphere – music for a disturbed world.