citzamaca
One of the best albums in this year. The album is a fusion of energy that is very deep, very cinematic, dark, space ambient.
Favorite track: searchlights through walls
The Japanese dance form butoh — for which dancers in white body paint generate painstaking movements — began after the Second World War. The dances of Tatsumi Hijikata explored the experience of the Japanese suffering body, and in the mid-1970s, Hijikata started giving dancers sketches and notes to push them towards this understanding of the form. Choreographies of Decay, the new album from Aix-en-Provence producer J.Doursou [J.D], functions in much the same way, relaying a series of sonic instructions for dancing at the end of the world.
After a series of releases under the name MY.HEAD, ranging from the longform Catharsis to several singles, albums and EPs, Choreographies of Decay is Doursou’s first album released under his name. Doursou works as a graphic designer, working in a wide range of visual media, with a deep understanding of how to translate between nonvisual and visual realms. Fitting, then, that he imagined the album as a dance piece. Like American Dreams labelmate claire rousay on her album a softer focus, Doursou incorporates field recordings into Choreographies of Decay, but where rousay’s field recordings traffic in intimacy, connecting a constellation of shared moments, Doursou’s hearken to a world without. His album draws from texts that imagine dystopian futures or supernatural events — video games like Nier Automata or The Last Of Us, the film Suspiria — and philosophy ranging from the existentialist to the post-structural. The album’s goal is to provide “a soundtrack to the moment,” excavated from the crises enmeshed within the COVID-19 pandemic.
The result is a dark, dense work, integrating a wide range of acoustic and electronic elements. Opening track “buildings will become their tombstones” foregrounds muted sheets of sound, evoking dial tones and the trappings of everyday life; meanwhile, “weeping idols” mixes an insistent synthesizer motif with a distant choir, first evoking sirens, then the hissing curvature of computer noise. “Jonas” is a microcosm of the album, mixing the incidental and diegetic: a slow, dampened piano riff interrupted by abrasive synth churns and ghostly choral suggestions. Here the music is sufficiently immersive to suggest that listeners are but a collection of characters in Doursou’s game, dancers in his dance. The synthesized swells of “foliage, filling voids,” and its crackling current in the high octaves, suggest the difficulty of finding reasons to carry on in circumstances that seem beyond redemption. If the former is a song for after watching the asteroid, penultimate tracks “surrounded by silence” and “cultural data”—with voices, guitar, here and there a hint of footsteps—are for staring it in the face. What do you do in a moment like that one? Doursou suggests two possibilities: observational versus active, cautious versus decisive. You can listen, you can dance.
credits
released February 25, 2022
Written, produced and arranged by J.Doursou (2020-2021)
Artwork by Zivile Aleknaviciute
Mastered by Andrew Weathers
special thanks to: Jordan, Pierre-Henri, Thomas, PEEV, Adèle, Baptiste, Zivile, Ben, Loïc, Joe, Pierre, Juan... and everyone i’ve forgot who has supported me during the making of this album.
supported by 4 fans who also own “Choreographies of Decay”
Organic yet glitched, folksy yet forward-looking, seamless yet utterly compartmentalized. Again, just like w/ his last album, "When the Roses..." jumps on my Best Music of 2023 list 1/2way thru my 1st listen/lesson. Already struggling to not overplay this on repeat. Otis Nugatory
supported by 4 fans who also own “Choreographies of Decay”
what do you do when you're rummaging around a haunted house and things start to go haywire? do you call on god to help? i would think so because she wouldn't want her subjects to go hungry or get scared without her approval Dumb mmmn
supported by 4 fans who also own “Choreographies of Decay”
I think this quote sums it up best: "All rooms were dark until light came. And here she was, in all of them at once. And she was not alone. Her grief was but one part of a vast grief, her fear only one of countless others. And this grief was only a half thing. There was the other half; of things born, of comfort in the shape of a new child, of food in the warmed body, of colors for the eye and sounds in the awakened ear, and spring wild flowers for the smelling." - Ray Bradbury Haunted Ghost
Made over the course of four dark months, Reece Thomas’s new record features synth compositions that are both beautiful & unsettling. Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 30, 2022