Death's Dynamic Shroud.wmv is a collaboration between three experimental music artists; James Webster, Tech Honors, and Keith Rankin. It's more or less a vaporwave project, or rather, a project that uses the logic of vaporwave to point beyond the limits of perception that bracket present notions of popular music- hurdling over their boundaries, and past a point at which the tastemakers of today experience only a chill of dread and the quake of homesickness.
Of these three co-conspirators, I'm best acquainted with the work of Keith Rankin, whose 2021 album Mirror Guide blew my mind several times over. However, my recent experience with DDS.wmv has convinced me that I need to leap down the rabbit hole of James and Tech Honor's discographies as well, as the collaboration's latest LP, Faith In Persona, is persuasively threshold puncturing, and has left me wanting to know more about the people who made it- this may be a fruitless effort though, as I will illustrate shortly. When tracing the topography of DDS.wmv's ephemeral output it is easy to discern an abandonment of the traditional cycles and structures of the album format, a trend within which Faith In Persona seems to be a deliberate, and concerted, outlier.
I have always found that there is something that tethers the album format to the ego of individual musicians in a way that can produce a bit of a paradox. What I mean by this, is that the thing that bears the artist's name, nearly always becomes a stand-in for the person who made it. I've long felt this dichotomy but didn't have the proper context to explain it before listening to Faith in Persona. For, from the album art, to the sequencing, to the choice of samples, DDS.wmv's latest LP appears to be an exploration of the way in which an artist's identity becomes absorbed or fused with their art in a way that anonymizes them- smoothing out and smothering the varieties and disambiguation of their personhood and ultimately reducing them a facade which subsumes them entirely.
The process of writing, recording, producing, distributing, and promoting a piece of art like an album, in the context of modernity, becomes, due to many forces beyond the artist's control, a kind of cessation and replacement of the maker with the thing that they have made. Through this lens, the making of art is not a creative utterance, but a hollowing out of the speaker. Not a means of achieving immortality, but a kind of reverse sublimation where something that is fluid and dynamic (identity) becomes irreversible calcified and inert (the product of that identity). A self gorgonification, and ultimately, a type and variety of irreversible death.
Following the trail a teardrop that plummets into the misty pit of the void ("Tear in Abyss") DDS.wmv warps and smears the vocals of various pop stars (but specifically Taylor Swift), layering them over a plundering of pleading percussive motifs, dissociative grooves, and softly confining synths to construct a maze of sound that demands progress, but with no discernable path of egress. After expressing its fear of existence and existential pain, Faith in Persona next mimics a cry for attention ("See Me"), a funky fallout that lands like a chandelier shattering on a ballroom floor.
Once this recognition of the extension of the artist's ego is attained ("Faith in Persona"), the immediate and superficially facets of the thing which the artist has presented for validation are seen to close in around the artist ("Pop Chin"), flattening them, reducing them to something peripheral ("Someone in the Room"), until finally, they entirely recede from what they are, and become only what they have said or shown ("Last Minutes of the Memory"), swallowed up by their work and vanity, their creation finally serves as no more than a headstone marking spent potential, and nothing more ("RIP").
DDS.wmv being recording artists, it is most fitting for them to connect these points of progressive deterioration within an accepted and traditionalist format, that of an LP, and the phenomenon they identify on Faith in Persona is observable at all levels of artistry, from the heights of professional single-churning, pop-dom, to the "name your price" DIY efforts dispersed around Bandcamp's marketplace. What's more, it is easy to see this process of strangulation and, finally, termination transpiring in nearly every artistic endeavor, whether it be a film, a novel, an opinion column, a Twitter feed, or a managed public persona. I don't know if it is possible to make art in today's world in a way that doesn't to some degree freeze the artist making it in a prison of acidic amber, but I like to think that unpacking it can be, at the very least, a helpful therapeutic step, for both maker and observer, if not one that begins a process capable of prying up the material reality that undergirds it. For someone for whom art and artists mean an awful lot, I think this is at the very least, a worthy goal.
It's out on Ghost Diamond.
