I have recently been reading some Philip K. Dick. If you don’t know him, Dick was a critically acclaimed American science-fiction author who wrote some 44 novels and countless short stories before his life was sadly cut short by a fatal stroke. In his novels, Dick plays around with a polymorphous set of themes, ranging from metaphysics to theology to nihilism and everything in between, but the theme that comes through strongest is Dick’s complete disregard for what we might call reality. In ‘Ubik’, for example, he writes of a world disintegrating and regressing to earlier times; in ‘The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch’ he writes about a drug-induced stupor that renders reality and unreality completely indistinguishable; and in ‘Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said’, he tells us the story of a famous TV presenter who wakes up one morning to find that his identity has been erased and no-one recognises him despite his worldwide popularity. In all these novels and beyond, Dick plays with reality, bending it, twisting it, and concocting intoxicating parallel existences that leave you, the reader, feeling utterly disorientated as you try to work out if what you’re reading is ‘actually happening’ or just happening in the mind of the novel’s protagonist. Usually, you can’t definitively work out which it is.
I mention all of this because this very same disorientation greeted me again when listening to The Diaphanoids new album, entitled ‘LSME’ and released on Tirk Recordings. The Diaphanoids are actually a duo, made up of Andrea Bellentani and Simon Maccari, perhaps better known as ‘Blakula!’, the name under which they have released three previous albums. The press release describes The Diaphanoids as Bellentani and Maccari’s ‘Space-Psycho Rock Project’, and in hindsight this is indeed a fairly accurate description of this album. I would probably add the prefix ‘Post’ to the word ‘Rock’, however. Pedantic terminology squabbling aside, this album beautifully combines elements of downtempo, ambient, and psychedelic post-rock, then sprinkles pretty much every drug both from the pharmacy and from the street on top. The result is something that sounds part hallucinogenic and part messianic, as soaring guitar riffs tremble over the top of soft, fuzzy, analogue sounding drum arrangements and twisted, garbled synth noises dance haphazardly between the lines.
Yet this doesn’t mean that all the songs melt into a single pot of droning noise. Far from it. The tempos are varied, and in each different song The Diaphanoids taketh sounds away with one hand as they addeth new sounds in with the other. My favourite song on here is the bafflingly named ‘Alltheconstellationsouttherearen'tworthapinpointofliquidlightinyoureyes’, the only one without any drums. It’s a lovely piece of deftly constructed ambient music which somehow shimmers with an urgent undercurrent of energy. Then we get the epic 8 minute long ‘The Blackest Sun’, a journey through a tunnel of emotional peaks and troughs. The guitar riffs writhe and scream with emotion over the top of a ritualistic drum beat, and odd other-worldly automated sounds oscillate in and out of the foreground. Across all 482 seconds of it, it’s never boring. It holds your attention as you wonder what sort of cosmic emission that guitar is going to hurl at you next. Mechanically ordered chaos at its very best.
The album opener ‘55th Dimension Nervous Breakdown’, which could be title of a Dick novel, has a similar sort of pounding, unrelenting beat but at a higher tempo, while ‘You Can’t Shine If You Don’t Burn’ drags things down to a slower, gently flickering speed. Tinges of oriental flavour permeate the song, and that guitar goes from strident to stifled as it chimes out a muffled electronic plea for help. ‘How Can I Distinguish Sky From Earth If They Keep On Changing Their Place’, which could also be the title of a Dick novel, is also good, driven by a repeating but somehow not repetitive bass tone. What’s more, the penultimate ‘Our Own Private Elsewhere’ is definitely the most ‘acid’ song you’ll find here. It’s distinctly strange: I feel like if motion sickness came with an accompanying soundtrack, this would be it. It bubbles and gurgles and sloshes around noisily, and the only thing that keeps you tethered to your sanity is, again, this ritualistic throbbing beat which tugs you along. Album closer ‘These Nights Wear Three Heads Five Arms And Ten Legs’ (what is it with these guys and song titles?) is the culmination of its predecessor, complete with riffs that the mentalist guitar player Yngwie Malmsteen would surely approve of.
Throughout the entire album this Dick-like theme of disintegrating reality persists. Have you seen the film Gravity? It’s a bit like the scenes in that where Sandra Bullock is spinning around in outer-space. It’s that sort of feeling of not knowing what is happening; what sounds are coming; what that guitar will do next; whether or not that faraway synth will accelerate towards you or continue to lurk uneasily in the acoustic shadows. Yet like when you read Dick, you emerge out of the other end not knowing exactly what’s just happened, but you feel richer for it nonetheless. Deliberately and consciously creating this sort of unreality is masterful, whether in written word or musical composition. The Diaphanoids may benefit from a quiet word from the record label about the length of their song titles, but sonically this is astounding.
In terms of criticisms, musically I don’t really have any. This album does what it sets out to do very well. The only thing I would perhaps say is that the order of the songs is wrong. I would never have put the slow burning ‘You Can’t Shine If You Don’t Burn’ straight after the more upbeat opener, and I would probably have had the ambient piece ‘Alltheconstellations…’ as the album closer as a way of winding it down. But, I suppose, you could argue that the organisation of the tracklist adds an extra dimension to that feeling of psychedelic disorientation, somewhat akin to being turned upside down by a tidal wave just after you’ve been floating around peacefully on an inflatable lilo.
All in all, this is an album that I rather like, and I think Philip K. Dick would too. Indeed, he once said of his novels that “I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.” Such a quote, for me, perfectly sums up what I think The Diaphanoids set out to do with this album. And I think they’ve succeeded. Therefore, if you like ambient music, post-rock, downtempo, or indeed anything with psychedelic overtones, you’ll at the very least find this album an intriguing and thoughtful listen.
Words: Matthew Scott
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