A dub-techno, ambient noir narrative of the non-dualistic world of new materialism, positing a rapproachment between it and us.
Claiming a terra nullius as its own, no structures, just site, activity and relationality, You Are Eternity is an absolutely brilliant long-playing debut. A dub-techno, ambient noir narrative of the non-dualistic world of new materialism, positing a rapproachment between it and us. Artfully processing digital lines and loops, the Italian duo of Daniele Antezza and Giovanni Conti have mixed twelve tracks into a serpentine neo-realism stretching over seventy minutes, a flexible grid that expands and contracts of its own volition.
It slithers into earshot with “Vibration,” slowly and excruciatingly, dub drawn and quartered by snails, with a sickly pall and rudimentary beats in big, abandoned spaces, at the end of which the voice of Fela Kuti warns the listener that “music is a spiritual gift and those who misuse it, die young.” As You Are Eternity gains momentum with “Life” and “Path,” it heads toward the “Truth,” revolving round samples of a congressional hearing taking Alan Greenspan´s worldview to task.
“Circle” is a collaboration with Scottish producer Edit Select that continues to chisel away at any edifice of veracity with rapid, stabbing beats, sending chips flying, only to be robbed of gravity and suspended mid-air on “Death,” a purgatory designed for the kind of opportunists Kuti warned about. “Death”‘s drums whip up a ritualistic frenzy before the grid flutters and expands again to make room for the wounded, monster-sized “Transfer” featuring King Cannibal, from which clash Dadub seem to gain renewed energy, expended on “Birth,” its beats whirling like a top.
The ambient “Unbroken Continuity” melts glaciers and hard drives and moves off the grid as the duo floats into “Experience” together with Øe (Fabio Perletta, sound artist and founder of the excellent Farmacia901 label), a ticking, juddering walk in outer space. Funnily enough, they find heaven there, in the form of dance, a fractured dance that pulverizes the dancers into iridescent fragments and disperses them in a fine particle mist that finally settles and becomes identical with the grid itself. As it necessarily must.
Guiding you as well as misleading you through this artefactual landscape, Dadub wants you to take yourself and your choices seriously. Perhaps neither the map nor the landscape are real, but you most certainly are.
You Are Eternity is available on Stroboscopic Artefacts. [Release page]
