Faustus
The title track of Daona‘s Live Machines greets you in an intense buzzing conferred in a heavy synthesis. A Pierre Boulez sleaze spinning tar-like, sweeping into a fiddled melody. A squeeze-boxed sinew glistening like the ceramic totems of the musicians involved; sounds slanting a drum / bass surprise smothered in a roasty hum. Its Skeletor menace slip-shot with trumpeted phantoms, swinging back into this awesome noir-shimmered centrifuge that ballerinas your head, flickers with sweet returns.
The music here thistles a composed and crafted ambience, eagerly pulling at its constraints. A flush of triggering sensibilities that are masterfully dark. Weaving energies tied to the spherical-shaped symphonics of the next track, “Mono No Aware”. Sonics that seem to bounce off the stern-faced
circles of samurai on the cover, spilling over in semaphore pulses and torn keystrokes. Brooding couriers that capture the imagination, spar with your senses, mingle with the cryptic track explanations on the inner sleeve maybe invite you to sip from the cup of further investigation.
Dancing a strange and beguiling grace, the cliché-less atmospherics churn a claustrophobic closeness that’s very cinematic. The serpenting clarinet and elasticated pluck on “Hot Cell” crawling all over you in a rumbling synth undulate. A spidering delight that
Daona mischiefs perfectly. Sonics that splinter-feed a distorted vocal that dribbles down your ears like a condensation-soaked wall. An exactitude that eats into you; obsidian scrys your hemispheres to fold softly round a
John Carpenter-esque demise.
The discordant daggers and psycho-esque slurs of “Beyond The Wire, The Ground Is Burning” digging that little deeper. Atonal shivers thrown open in a pleasing array of
Stravinsky sustain and bassy plummets, flowering filaments that slip their skin to inform the plunging neckline of the epic closing track “Some Place Where Hope Runs Out”. A drone-wrapped butterfly, its beaconing centre all
ritualised hymn in a halo of organ uplifts and solemn spirals. A sorrowful melody slowly pecked apart and smacked over the head.
The first musical riches of 2024 have landed.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
The title track of Daona‘s Live Machines greets you in an intense buzzing conferred in a heavy synthesis. A Pierre Boulez sleaze spinning tar-like, sweeping into a fiddled melody. A squeeze-boxed sinew glistening like the ceramic totems of the musicians involved; sounds slanting a drum / bass surprise smothered in a roasty hum. Its Skeletor menace slip-shot with trumpeted phantoms, swinging back into this awesome noir-shimmered centrifuge that ballerinas your head, flickers with sweet returns.
