Dinural Burdens & Ypsmael - Sode

 Released: March 16

A new collaborative album from two prominent atmospheric noise aesthetics artists, Sode is a rather dense album. The tonality of the album remains dark for virtually all of its over half an hour runtime, which is divided into two halves with multiple shorter movements within. The first half, titled “Glump,” breaks itself roughly into two distinct movements. For the first half, we are treated to sparse and airy scrapes and clicks with minimal tonal content. Slowly, a deep and rough bass drone fades into the mix, undergirding everything with this sense of weight and heaviness. The soft scrapes are now replaced with fragile and broken sounding tones, punctuating a heavy drone with a sense of lightness that does not convert to brightness. By the end of the first half, all of this has further transformed into an even rougher and more grinding scene that has dramatically increased in density. 

The second half of this dark adventure continues a similar trajectory, though side feels a bit more surreal and with more sonic punctuations. There’s a moment right before things start to shift into a denser scene before the deep drones fully come in. IT’s a moment in which you can hear that deep drones trying to come in to the picture, almost in small surges that feel like a start but die away quickly. As it more fully forms, the surges fade and a steady static joins the atmosphere, painting jagged images bathed in a greenish-gray fog. Then, everything disappears for but a short moment, then returns as a fully fleshed out drone that feels as though it is reverberating in an ice palace. The atmosphere for both pieces is genuinely haunting, but remains so thoroughly abstracted from reality that it leaves the listener pleasantly confused.