034 :: CONFUSION
Listen to "034 :: CONFUSION" on Spreaker.Featuring
I Am Toward You by How To Dress Well, released by Sargent House in 2024. Listen / Buy direct
Transcript
From its very first notes, it's like a beatific vision. Almost laughably so, with its arpeggiated harp, ethereal synths, and lush reverb. It welcomes us warmly, sweetly. But before long it will overwhelm our senses.
The first voice we hear sounds tiny and distant, dwarfed by the enormity around it, as if singing into the void. And then the voice modulates and duplicates, in the first of many transformations. Quickly the voice mutates even further, pitched up to new heights, until it starts to deteriorate. And then it is distorted beyond all recognition, right as it is delivering its most soulful plea.
It's like the song is trying to discover the limits of what music can be. How much can a melody be manipulated before it loses its tune? How much can a sound be bent before it breaks? And what's remarkable about this song is that, despite all its sonic chaos and distortion, it remains a thing of beauty – sparkling, shimmering, and diaphanous. These voices should seem terrifying, like a demonic cabal, and yet, they feel like an angelic chorus, delivering us to another world.
And this is only the beginning. The artist is about to push things even further, packing as much as possible into a single sonic moment, producing an experience that's somewhere in between ecstasy and obliteration.
It's like this music wants to bring its ensemble of sounds to the brink of annihilation, distorted almost to the point of incomprehension – but not quite. Throughout it all, it remains a thing of beauty. And maybe that's why the music can seamlessly shift between its opening cacophony and these interstitial moments of delicacy, as if a whisper is not the opposite of a wall of sound but just another way of revealing the divine.
It's like the song is trying to become as noisy as possible without ever falling into atonality or darkness. It's like a brilliant beam of light, so brilliant that it blinds our vision, without ever making us wish to avert our gaze.
And just when you thought nothing more could be added, there are drums. And not just drums, but a stampede of percussion. It's like the Rapture, leaving us guessing as to whether we are being destroyed or saved.
It's like every sound that has ever been heard is here in this one moment, and it's beautiful – irresistibly, oppressively beautiful.
Liner Notes
I can't help but mention that Tom Krell, the artist behind How To Dress Well, completed a PhD in Philosophy in 2022, with a thesis titled "The Threat of Nihilism and the Prospect of Non-Nihilistic Metaphysics in Jacobi and Hegel". (The full text of the thesis is currently under embargo, and won't be publicly available for download until July 9, 2032.)