Deru - Trying to Remember
Deru's latest release for M3rck, Trying to Remember, manifests itself in a fog of particles, as a collection of songs that struggle to express themselves through veils of static and hazy sandstorms. The songs are the breakbeat equivalent of isotope decay -- charged ions rattling against a Geiger counter with random frequency as if the source of their expression was a wild mélange of radioactive elements, a heavy metal bouillabaisse. Filled with radio static and particles of blown sand, Trying to Remember is an obscurity of memory that suggests melody more than it is actively driven by it.
"Spread Your Arms" is overrun with a gentle river of static while a single note melody pines with aching melancholy over a tiny ripple of chattering synthetics. It's the sound of the high desert sands trying to cover up a rusting piece of machinery that has lost its way. The machine struggles on towards its destination, servo-motors whining with the heat and the grit while internal alarms sound their distress with increasingly fainter calls. "The Reasons," a thirty-eight second explanation of the record, is nothing more than the processed sound of a windstorm blowing sand through an empty house. The opening of "Tapah" is a walk into the depth of the desert, past the dust devils and shifting dunes (the payoff of "Tapah" is the delicious oasis of rhythm and whispered voices that lives beyond that wall of dirt). "The Days Before Yesterday" is a Mobius strip of decrepit loops, struggling to bring themselves back into a cohesive sonic structure, but too much air has gotten into the works and the edges of the loops fragment and fracture with each iteration. The bell loops of "Only The Circle" close the record with their fading song against a rising hiss of static like sunlight dying across an expanse of wind-burned rock.
The delight of Deru's record is that it takes the crackling focus of Pole's static and locks it into an echo chamber with delicate bell tone melodies and M3rck's penchant for breakbeat, spinning everything into a slowly evolving windstorm of brushed noise and fragmented downtempo. Trying to Remember is desert chillout music to follow a wild night of tribal dancing across the hard sand of the arid plateau. The summoned spirits whisper through the night with tongues of sand. This is a gorgeous record.
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