gench

Opprobrium Review: Sonicism

Can't say I've bumped into any youthful contemporary hipsters clad in Dimuzio t-shirts buying a pint of milk down the local dairy, but you can safely extrapolate that if your CD cabinet houses recordings by John Duncan, Christoph Heemann, Michael Prime, or Jim O'Rourke, plastic can easily be rearranged to make room for a bit of Dimuzio product. Dimuzio's m.o. isn't especially radical or new and in the hands of a lesser might even be boring - he takes sounds made on a range of instruments (too many to list here), sounds sampled from a range of sources (again, too many to list here) and sounds taken from field recordings of various locations (really, too many to list here), and mixes them all up, refining the result into something that doesn't sound anything like the original form, or anything else at all, for that matter. Drone being the key concept: whether it be the thin-air-fading patent of the aforementioned, old-school post-industrial style, or present day uh-mbient soundscape, Dimuzio meshes his sources into blissful dreamscape washes at once pleasurably familiar and challengingly alien. The full stretch of the sonic spectrum is adequately covered, the two discs segmented into several shortish pieces (linked by some tenuous 'concept' with which I grapple still) which adroitly position ear-full surround-headphone-flood next to passages best not listened to in a room containing an open fire, with volume and texture masterfully controlled throughout. Sure there's a bit of it going around at the moment, but this is as fine an example of the genre as recently springs to mind, and if you're remotely interested in getting acquainted with Dimuzio, Sonicism (pronounced with a soft 'c', please), followed by his Odd Size releases and previous RRR CD Markoff Process, is the ideal way to shake his hand. —Nick Cain