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October 23, 2020 - Pirates Blend
Some people think the only good music on this planet is music which follows their expectations and doesn’t ask them any questions. It hovers in familiar chord progressions, in recognizable compositional syntax, never stepping beyond genre lines. “Talent” becomes “how well a musician plays an inoffensive sound” to their ears. These people only want to hear what they know, because knowing it all is a form of escape from the chaos of existence. The music they revere is harmonious and only elicits good feelings in a world filled with anguish that we normalize day after day. Everything else is downgraded to noise and nonsense. Nobody wants to remember that living is painful, and they sure don’t want the leisure activity of music to remind them that it is.
What a tragedy.
Experimental Canadian newcomer producer Affect Display, aka Damien Smith, has demonstrated a clear determination not to appeal to the some people among us. His debut album, Animal Drift Animal, released on Pirates Blend Records, is a collection of lush ambient electronica, tinged with techno mood and post-rock sensibility, and designed to remind us of the high contrasts we medicate to forget—the good, the beautiful, the bad and the ugly. Despite the sleepy stereotypes often associated with the ambient genre, Smith’s body of work is not peaceful, but it is resolved to exist anyway. Dark, psychedelic, dissonant, loose in structure, rich in texture, Smith weaves the familiar and unfamiliar in and out of scope. By applying a subtle pressure to your psyche like the aftermath of watching a psychological thriller on film, these soundscapes will keep you up all night wondering why you are awake.
A technique Smith uses throughout the album is pitching his notes up and down by half steps, creating disharmony with your expectations of the melodies he’s laid down. While this isn’t a groundbreaking musical technique, he does seem to know exactly when to apply it to elicit a stress response in the listener. A great example of this is how he designed ‘Transference,’ layering what starts as a tender, hymn-like vocal sample on top of itself, pitching it up and down again, oscillating between auditory clash and harmony, conflict and resolution. ‘Dauen’ is a further exploration of this technique, pushing the half-step pitching further toward its limit, closer to the edge of pain. I’ll be honest, listening to this push-pull is not easy, but it is interesting.
Many of the tracks on Animal Drift Animal are crafted to feel like five songs in one, and each comes off with the heightened drama of a cinematic soundtrack. For example, the opening track ‘Until The Light Hits The Door’ changes its costume at least four times from start to finish, declaring itself, then relating back to itself, then relating back to itself again, then again. Like a spoken message in a game of telephone, the initial melodic idea unravels in its repetition and reinvents itself as you move through the song, growing into something related but very different by the end. Naturally, this transformation is a lot to keep track of and requires active listening from the very inception. You suddenly realize you’re on a journey with a guide who wants to maximize your emotional gamut. You’re now speeding through a tour of every ecosystem on Earth in seven tracks. Or watching a century of life flash before your eyes and hit your amygdala like an adrenaline shot. Contemplative but not meditative, Animal Drift Animal presents a sort of calculated turmoil that hits us at an interesting time, at the end of a lonely pandemic year. We’re tired but the train carries us along toward the end of the continent anyway. In the dark, Affect Display asks us to accept the space around us and to really see it for what it is instead of hiding away in false light. ☔