And here we have Steve Davis from Love Earth Music himself. His +DOG+ project has not really managed to no surprise or dissatisfy me, so I’m diving in right away. Volume is set to a proper lever, I have a little Text Editor open on my computer, and the first disc is in the player. The first track on “The Light Of Our Lives” is called “Painter Of Paintings”, and it’s already great. What a nice balance of sounds and layers here. The second track, “Preemptive Love”, seems to be the noise of Steve and someone drumming. It’s not unlike the Peace & Love project on LEM, and well, I’m less fond of improvised drums, but I have nothing to complain about as the noise makes up for it.
Tracks 3, 4 and 5 are all reserved for Steve doing Steve things. Various ways of sound creation and composition can be heard, as well as multiple styles of noise because you know +DOG+ doesn’t stick to just one genre or output. The variety of things makes it an interesting project and why I keep returning to positive words and descriptions. The following two tracks are again based on drums and noise, but then there is “The First Day In This World”, a 16-minute epic composition with almost everything you can imagine. Starting with some guitar riffs in the background, slowly, a layer of post-apocalyptic sounds gets pushed toward the front. And as layers of subtle rattling noises develop … Wait … More guitar … Harmonics … Some intense bass rumbling. Is it over? Was that 16 minutes?
I’m left puzzled, and it’s always good if music does that. I mean, these are not silly pop songs we’re listening to. There is no structure in chaos (mostly) and it’s all about atmospheres. The 40 minutes of CD1 passed but we’re not sad. There are another 35 minutes on disc 2. It’s all just too much to put on one disc, so best to make it into a nice package.
Disc 2 is another exercise in different ways to make music. Some harsher tracks, some tracks with drums again, some almost minimal ambient drone noise (“Crows Around”), harsh cup-up (“Sunflowers 2”) and of course, some extreme experimentations in minimalism (“Once There Were Woods There” and “The Silence Of Sound”). Many songs remain under or just on the 3-minute mark, and that’s a pity. Only the somewhat hypnotic cut-up analogue experiment “The End Of Hopelessness” got the time to develop itself before it ended after seven minutes and 1 second.
“The Light Of Our Lives”, I think, is what makes Steve Steve. He loves to experiment and look beyond the horizon. He is not afraid to do things and experiment and learn from it. And put his learnings into the next album because he releases quite a lot, as you might know. Maybe it’s time for another one in the X-Series where a few of these experiments can develop more. I would be curious how, for example, “This One Life” would develop if it got more time than the three minutes it has now. Oh, and the Bandcamp download for the Homo Universalis Digitalis gets a bonus track, “DeRevolution 1,” which is a tribute to the glory that is feedback. Great one, Steve!
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