Eva Sajanova & Dominik Suchy - Decision Paralysis [Weltschmerzen - 2023]Eva Sajanova and Dominik Suchy's collaborative recording, Decision Paralysis , is an album of viscerally surreal electronic ambience and spoken/sung vocals, an ultra-modern post-industrial treat along the lines of CoH Plays Cosey or ANBB's Mimikry. The digital minimalist world of labels like Line and Raster Noton meets the psychedelic ritual ambient aesthetics of groups like Coil or Nocturnal Emissions. Advanced synthesis techniques are employed to create dissonant, phasing, eroded tones. I am reminded of the synth work of Thighpaulsandra when he was in Coil, in the late 90's and early 00's. The resulting sound remains tuneful, yet filled with chaotic modulation. Eva Sajanova's voice is looped, layered and reverberated into resonating wisps of tonality. Granular scrambling re-writes the structure of her words into scalar castle ramparts.
Bjork's Medúlla is perhaps another place where I have heard something similar to this attempted. The structure of the music is built out of the voice itself, and therefore remains fairly nebulous, as it is constructed from improvised fragments. Eva has a breathy, hushed tone, as Bjork often does.
The progressions are distinctly sombre and gothic. On a certain level, this is experimental darkwave, at its core melodically very close to classical music in this genre, but without the synth-pop drum machine, and the melodic progressions often heavily mutated with processing. Dominik Suchy at times engages in almost trance-like arpeggiations, the likes of which Thighpaulsandra would never touch, introducing a neo-classical harmonic complexity.
The tones are rich in color and vividness, the same way I felt about Coil's Musick to Play in the Dark (1 and 2). This album would make an excellent pairing with those, never breaking the mood for a second if you were to segue from one to the other. As with the best music of this psychedelic pagan subset of post-industrial music, there is a reverent spiritual quality and thoughtful emotional sensitivity to this sound, as well as a resonant tonal beauty, which most might not associate with the stereotypes of 'industrial'. To check it out for yourselves Josh Landry
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