After Siôn Orgon’s brilliant Black Object comes this freshly minted dozen. Dust is a mini LP whose first track takes no prisoners, births this baby in muscled metal, words dark’n’glistening, then slamming a singular technoid, a ballsy brilliance that surrounds itself in a jaded tinsel epitaph.
I thought it would be hard to better 2008’s Zsigmondy Experience, but Dust is giving me a layer cake of riches, cruising into “Head Bomb”, a crashing carcass of clever processing and torched dissection. Fracturing tensives suddenly detonating a bastardised pearl, a jabberwocky of repeated yahyahs rhythmically sucking and growing intense, then departing on a namaste of wind-caught chime.
Key collaborator Thighpaulsandra has been enlisted to sprinkle his modular magic on a few tracks, but “Who Do You Think You Are” is the only one that employs his vocals in a sinister sinew that lurks between grating metal and hacking cough. The attention-grabbing dynamics here are ace, they ripcord your head, then pour in a polluted pollen that suddenly smoulders into dreamy harmonics in a surprise snatch of ’80s pop that lets in the light, then goes seriously molten, to finally tumble into a rancid ambiance. A real eye-opener of a track, that the Coil-like energies of “Disintegration” intersect, raise the bar with a Nine Inch Nails-like injection of industrialised pop. Orgon’s angsty vocals stab wayward in noisy overdrive excess, the aftermath of which slumbers into the beguiling nectar of “The Mouth That Has No Face”, an expanding psychedelic track cracking open a gorgeous smile. A gentle jolt of traditional musicality gliding on a weird overlapping sustain, then souring in watery weals, rotating round something that lives within its cauldron depths, slowly vaporising like an expectant mirage.Without a doubt, Dust demonstrates Siôn Orgon to be a master of unease, happiest when tangent-tearing into the roadmap to squirrel in a surreal sizzle, and ultimately weaselling plenty of wonder.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
