“This isn’t long enough, Tony!” I scream at
absolutely friggin’ nobody, and it’s just as well – nobody would understand
what I’m talking about, let alone me in general. I’ll give you a little background:
Tony Lien, purveyor of Bad Cake Records, is Dere Moans, and every release he
blesses us with is a plunderphonic masterpiece. No, he’s not taking whole Blink-182
songs or whole Spice Girls songs and repurposing them for our referential pleasure.
Whatever the heck he’s sampling, it ain’t something that I recognize, and that’s
all the better – that means I can enjoy A
Dereliction without the intrusion of outside influence.
But it’s too short.
Fine, so it’s technically an EP or whatever,
big deal. And I say these things to completely praise Tony’s abilities, because
I haven’t met a Dere Moans release I haven’t immensely liked. There’s really
nobody that can rip through source material and come up with wildly inventive concoctions
quite like Tony Lien, and here he straddles the line between complete cut-up
sonic terrorism and a static-y sound puzzle that’s missing only a few pieces of
frequency before it blooms into weird euphony. Listening to A Dereliction makes me wonder how in the
living crap there hasn’t been a Dere Moans release on Orange Milk yet. It’s
like someone’s taken a literal scissors to music here and reassembled it. That’s
sort of the Orange Milk way.
But this is on Already Dead. Already Dead is so
friggin’ awesome.
Look, there’s no way I’m not going to bombard
your Twitter feed with “#BuyDereMoans” posts, because I’m halfway in the
nuthouse here and A Dereliction is
making more sense than most of what I encounter on a daily basis. And that’s
fine – it’s a cracked mirror of abstract sound manipulation that has to be
heard to be believed, and believed to be understood, and understood to be embraced,
and embraced to be beloved, and beloved to be uploaded to Soulseek or whatever
is on the internet now. Just kidding, buy a tape – #BuyDereMoans.
https://deremoans.bandcamp.com/
https://alreadydeadtapes.bandcamp.com/
--Ryan