I have recently been writing more on Twitter in book format with retweets/headers about the absence of consciousness within technology. It is also why it takes me longer to digest music like Moon Zero, because it is basically all that I want. Within these unsoncious drone edifices is a darkly honeyed sycamore tree, not sychophancy of the mind, but what all at Fluid have been versed with for getting on for a decade, and can get behind. The complete lack of generic metre and rhythm is only propped up semiconciously – the loophole territory for diaristic (composing, writing, producing, making) to flourish. And this portentuous attitude runs throughout all of Denovali’s releases in current territory, becoming more brazenly cinematic with John Lemke and polarised into placidness by Moon Zero.
Moon Zero is a alias for producer Tim Garratt, a dronescapist operating prolifically out of Londons Cable Street Studios and percolated by a link festivally with Berlin for Denovalis technology maingate. I do not know if he works much in other countries but there is a rich intuition with non-Western modality and non-resolution here. The music is honey-suckered to Indian classical music and Dhrupad Buddhist drone mantras and ragas in the vein of Terry Riley and Born Of Six, but with a sizeably altruistic and compulsively sprocketed sprouting of electricity and atomicity. In short, the length of the drone feedback on display, pulsularly piston-punched by elliptical eletric guitars, creates a frisson with post-apocalyptic and
dystopian futures that turned curried in the mix before condensing into a turgid whole. Like Christian Fennesz, tracks including ‘The Solipsist’ boom with continuity towards unwravelling liquidity, and maintain a morose mixture of turbulent sonics disposing of the after time mantra that has long been left behind.
Time is a philosophy all by itself, and this music exists all by itself too. It stands on its own two feet, and pertains in small brushstrokes that ebb outwards like crashing waves of concrete against a nuclear reactor. The explosive, prompt and fastiduous nature of ‘Heritage Guilt’ is that ghost ship of technology: caught between a rock and a hard place, a paving slab to walk on and a destruction device to career into, the sounds are powerfully kept in suspensful limbo through augmented time signature stasis. Evaporation becomes a thing of the past at the first gate of this heavy dream.
The most emotive second comparison I have for tunes such as these is Godspeeds ‘Terrible Canyons of Static’ interpolated with an indeterminate fixity glance. Timbre wise burning like a predator whales stomach, the revolvent retrospectivity of ‘A Bevan Rotation’ offers a glimmer of collapsing iron with a shiny surface. In this nature the non-resolute, bygone chemical reaction that birthed the record is cast aside; the future beckons us into unknown robotic cycles that don’t just tumble drone-idiomatically in a washing machine fashion. Moon Zero have spun out a mighty release, and a mighty release for me, the consecutive listeners, and all that got lost in the black holes of time.