Dowser – Schema 1+2

All Horned Animals

Dowser‘s Schema 1+2 comprises two forty-minute tracks that have a lovely sketchbook quality. An idea fountain that Rudolf Valentinos the random, roulettes through sonic flavours to delight in the fertile notion of collision. Hiroyuki Nagashima, the person behind Dowser, teaches film sound design at Tokyo University of the Arts, which is no surprise as his score for the ‘90s cyberpunk film 964 Pinocchio (currently watching on YouTube) is the absolute business.

Deeply embedded in the plasticity of sound, Dowser’s sound world takes in everything including an alt-pop collab with Phew (Big Picture) that I’ve just added to my ever growing track-down list. This latest newbie release after a brief hiatus holds true to the man’s wandering passions, combining the talent of Masateru Terai (instruments, voice) and Takashi Miyagawa, who is the band’s visual muse. Each track packs quite a punch, a reactive slipstream that crams in a lot of flavoursome action, readily hooks you up to some mighty fine transfiguring ambience.

The first track hits you up with plasticised blurs affixed to a melodic underling. Enveloped and overlapping textures feed in some nice weirded-out drone candy, slamming to full-on rock-out surprise before getting softly celestial. Intriguing shapes stippled and percussively bubbled, fluxing in hissy transits and snake-charmed loops.

There’s something very engaging about the sounds created, the way they percolate, like layered parallelograms that slide in and out of focus, cannibalistically gobbling themselves up in differing directions — you never quite know where it’s heading and you are always pleased by its multitude of destinations. Music that allows your imagination to wander within its fabric, get a little lost in. A flyscaped cobweb of scribbled sucks and flickering accents that wouldn’t go amiss on a Nurse With Wound track, all tied up with a delicious wahhhhhh-whirred dry battery moan.

The second track rushes you in watery mechanics and massive noise bleeds that tonally shunt out / taper. Schisming details, all sonar-stepped and walkie-talkie wield that leads to a poppy approximation of what sounds like a radical rework of Bauhaus‘s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” stuck in a marble maze. Sounds that continue to be turned inside out and greasy-spooned, racket-rinsed and warring into a bingo-shaped abacus. A Tron-like pulsation can be heard lurking in hiccuping schematics, finding a pleasing cohesion in vocal yelps and melodic meld.

I’m summarising a little bit, but its hard not to as there’s so much going on, but I’m very partial to all the metallic pummelling and the dislocated Japanese voices in here. A rewarding listen, those mellow pleasure zones hugging the transitions are just as gorgeous as the splattered ISDN drizzle and strobe-lit destabilisation that wrap around them. Sounds that throw you a strange drum’n’bass bone to cut back on the rusty see-saw of a child’s swing and rotting keystrokes whose inners get wonderfully sine-crushed to ghostly laughter.

Schema 1+2 is something I’m gonna continue to enjoy unpicking for a long time to come.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-