EP Review: Dreamcrusher – HAINE
Courtesy of Ilia Rogatchevski
★★★★
Charcoal feet commandeer sordid paving stones, intent on clipping tired heels and crushing misguided toenails. This lax corpus is swaying with fatigue, no longer pursued, but still desperate to escape resolute shadows. Lascivious thirst diverts attention away from the fading bloodhound bark and onto the mysterious ceilidh in the distance. Dancing embers ignite the midnight holt as the cobbled suburb disappears. Howling convulsions colour the night. Versatile mechanisms weave in amongst the dark verticals, no doubt influenced by the whispering music. Curiosity pulls at latent viscera like an overbearing nicotine craving. Inside the maternal spotlight, gluttonous dancers excrete a bleak, ontological futurism onto the corrupt and faceless banquet.
Luwayne Glass – resident of Wichita, Kansas and more commonly known as Dreamcrusher – paints this decadent scene with a brush composed of human hair. He invites us into this frightening euphoria to show us, that try as we might, there is no way to circumvent our innate barbarism. ‘Memories’ attempts to unlock illicit inhibitions with clipped beats and a splintered melody. There are hints of violent sadism beneath the sonic veil and one wouldn’t be crucified for assuming that this song is Nurse Ratched’s favourite background record for asylum recreation time. ‘Sister Europe’, originally by the Psychedelic Furs, highlights Dreamcrusher’s avid pop sensibility. Guest vocals by Annathelia complement the insatiable semantics of an ailing factory. Her persuasive euphony adds a ghostly dimension to an already cryptic environment; seducing, like a siren, vagrant labourers to their untimely demise.
Glass’s music is esoteric. On paper, it should only appeal to kids of the Witch House extraction. ‘La Haine’ is as analeptic as electroconvulsive therapy. Sanity ebbs and wanes, like iron towers which glitch in free fall. Delectable soil rains from overcast heavens. However, a certain pop-orientated logic appears on repeated listens. The closing track, ‘Grayscale’, is actually quite danceable. A closer look at his opulent back catalogue reveals that Dreamcrusher feels just as at home in an art gallery as he does at a secluded forest rave.
As a self-appointed ‘nihilist, queer, revolutionary’, Glass taps into a dystopian future where man and machine are fused together in an orgy of industry. Silver pistons atomise the remaining particles of individualistic trajectories bequeathed to us by fathers of the Enlightenment. There are also allusions to a mutant cockroach oligarchy, ruling a post-Ballardian netherworld where a binary-programmed slave drum orchestrates the working day. In this place, perception is monochromatic; everything moves in close-ups and physical laws adhere to Luis Buñuel’s surrealist determinism. Gregg Araki is said to be making a documentary of this greasy mess, but the film is going straight to video.
HAINE is set for release on 5 September 2014 via This Ain’t Heaven Recording Concern, Lazed In You and Bandcamp.
