Dadamah

No doubt about it: this record “is not a dream”. It's much more than that: it's the advent of the simple and eternal game of the world. But where the “simple” and the “game” reside, there too lies “enchantment” - that which repeats itself pure and unblemished. Roy Montgomery, far away in his forgotten homeland (New Zealand), likely understood just how divine Music can be when left to wander in circles, as in an infernal round dance; and how, in the end, nothing concrete remains of that dance, only a dangerous joy. The same joy that seeps into every chord of his guitar; the same joy that presses against the limits of the “song-form”, destroying its meaning and its necessity. In this way, the music becomes a litany, a paroxysm of the restless spirit; and it lets every emotion of ours turn into another, and then another still, until exhaustion, until the delirium that is already a premonition of the end.

Settling in and letting yourself be rocked by the faint, melancholy breath of “Prove” is akin to taking on its sickly, at times morbid texture - a texture for which the Velvet Underground were the one and only “evil” teachers.

There's something in all of "This Is Not A Dream", in its exasperated "trance", that stays aloof, almost as if it had no need to fully reveal itself. Behind this sound bordering on chaos there is, probably, an entire musical civilization seeking its ultimate consecration, its greatest yearning. Take the crescendo of "Limbo Swing". Imagine a sickly-sweet "Sister Ray", without redemption. Imagine a voice submerged by its own emotional tension. The black hole into which everything seems to plunge is the last virgin space: beyond it, only an ecstatic dispersal. The "Reed-ish" boogie of "Papa Doc" is infested by a listless organ set in the background. Two voices face off asynchronously. Two different registers: a single state of mind. Which, in essence, is the same one that pervades the whole agonizing structure of "Too Hot Too Dry", steeped in languid "psych" guitar work. Here too, Dadamah prove excellent at sketching "metaphysical" ballads, masterfully balancing stasis and chaos, flashes of melody and noise in perfect Pere Ubu style.

In any case, in "Brian's Children" the slow, inexorable development of the track is done away with, enacting a sharp and sudden break between the intimate intro and that bacchanal aimed straight at the stars. Even here, though, the taste for the "circularity" of the musical event remains intact. A "circularity" that becomes an evocation of millennial landscapes in "High Tensione House". Or rather, it might be better to point out how every tiny sonic particle already holds within itself a fragment of "eternity", a fragment, precisely, of that inexorable and terrible "circularity". Montgomery's delivery is austere, charged with pathos; ultimately: restless. In stark contrast, then, with the softness of the musical setting, arranged so as to resemble a "non-track" of ambient music à la Brian Eno.

With this track the original vinyl edition ends, released with the backing of Majora, a small Seattle label. In 1995 Kranky reissued the album on CD, changing the cover and adding five tracks from the same sessions.

The first of these bonus tracks is the evanescent "Nicotine", amid tribal drumming, intermittent organ and pervasive gloom. Pieters' singing is just a crackling turmoil of cold, hermetic emotions. It's no coincidence, then, that "High Time" looks to British goth to scatter further "imploded" tension throughout the album's macrostructure. The "astral groove" of "Scratch Sun" rises imposingly amid a sea of cacophonous whirls, weaving a luminous trail that acts as an Ariadne's thread for the guitar's "primitivist" jolts. The whole track rests on an abstract scaffolding, presenting itself as one great fresco of postmodern art. On the side of a certain sixties-style garage rock (13th Floor Elevators, Sonics, etc.) sits "Radio Brain", to which the use of various interferences lends an extra degree of eccentricity. Not forgetting, however, the further "abstractions" that blossom wherever Pieters' bass and Stagg's keyboards spark against each other. The reiterated chords of "Replicant Emotions", finally, let the last cloud of anguish unfurl, this time just long enough not to ask why...

That Montgomery is a genius, deep down, I've never had any doubts. It's up to you, now, to give him his due. First, by treating yourselves to one of the greatest albums of the entire past decade (no matter how many, upon its release, didn't even give it a second thought...); then, by letting your soul settle into these scenarios made of dreams that are not really dreams; of magic that turns out to be nothing but ancestral lies; of emotions worn away by the desire for eternal peace. It's hard to believe that an album like this was conceived and recorded in such a remote land. Remote like the land of the Spirit; remote like its "need" to confront Life with its terrible truth. Which is not so much a masochistic gesture, as the one true sign of humankind's greatness.

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29/10/2006