It’s kind of an “oldschool minded”, classic type IDM record. Close to my heart, feels right, calm.
The Black Dog – The Grey Album
The Black Dog – Liber Dogma
I’m not as amazed by this as I was with Post-Truth and Black Daisy Wheel but it’s still a good listen and worth noting. Genrewise this is a bit all over the place from IDM to techno and electro. That said, I’m not fan of the more experimental tracks on this one and like the more laid back, easy-going tunes.
The Black Dog – Post-Truth
Supposedly the uptempo twin brother of Black Daisy Wheel with often melodic but mostly beat focused techno, house and IDM instead of the ambient landscapes. In 2015 these guys totally surprised me with my own reaction of how much I loved their record of the time, and now I feel the same. Lucky that I didn’t create any top lists last year because this one would be missing from there.
The Black Dog – Black Daisy Wheel
Ambient dreamscapes with occasional thumping rhythms. Atmospheric soundtrack to slowly panning images of motion frozen in still frames.
“The mindset is beyond paranoid, the discourse so far post-fact that only opinion and assumed identity matter. […] The impact on mental health is corrosive: fear, uncertainty and doubt multiply and replicate until the most ridiculous theories are invented to explain the most basic things: tarmac, banana skins, duvets. […] The distinction between the real world and the world of an auto-hoaxer is so blurred that reality melts away; you’re only ever one personal detail away from being doxxed, at which point reality bites back, hard.”
Interesting to see that almost all moody ambient music lately are released with sleeve notes about a dystopian present, social degeneration, meaninglessness of communication, an evaporating trust in anything or anyone, and so on. One thing to note here is that these are not about dystopian futures anymore, but a dystopian current state. The other thing is that there are no megacorporations, alien intruders, getting lost in seventeenth dimensions, or black magic, all the various tropes of dark ambient are gone today, and everything is just a large blur of resignation, pointlessness and disappointment of people, our lives, the world.
The Black Dog – Neither/Neither
The new Black Dog album provides an equal amount of moody-darkish electronics, some ambient peace and pleasant techno. For the first run I listened to it five times in a row. And still rolling once a day. Something I didn’t see coming and offers a great deal of pleasant surprise.