People Skills — Mount Moriah Tocsin (Alien Passengers)
It’s no surprise that a tape recorded in a cemetery should have a doom-struck, dreadful vibe. And that’s not so profound a departure from the governing aesthetic of People Skills, the solo electronic project of Philadelphia’s Jesse Dewlow. The project’s most widely available records — Tricephalic Head (2014) released on Siltbreeze, and Gunshots at Crestridge (2016) on Blackest Ever Black — are grimly gorgeous affairs, on which Dewlow’s canny ear for emotive melody is augmented and punctuated by waves of distortion, manipulated field recordings and unidentifiable, digitally treated weirdness. Mount Moriah Tocsin carries the experimental spirit of those recordings into even stranger, crepuscular territory, and the resulting music (or perhaps more appropriately, sound) is as compelling as it is mournful, by turns discomfiting and magisterial.
The tape isn’t entirely dour or mired in misery. Dewlow’s gift for engineering beautiful music out of his gear breaks through the sound’s surface at a number of points. “Harboring Criminals,” which opens the tape’s second side, combines gentle washes of sound, twisting in vertiginous minor chords. But rumbles (much like thunder) and other burbling and hollow-sounding rhythms rise and then dominate the song’s second half, as the gentler sounds flatten into ominous drone. “Harboring Criminals” segues directly into “Walking on the Highway,” in which a mid-century, big-band swing track is suspended under a thin layer of water. A saxophone (maybe?) is isolated and amplified, then distended into the sound of a big mosquito humming at your ear. The tape’s loveliest sound, the piano and violin track that runs through “Dreamt You Were a Car,” is shot through with what sounds like a grumbling stomach. No mood or mode is given much by way of breathing space.
A couple of the tape’s longer tracks — “Paramnesia” and “Fish Illustration” — have the patterned characteristics of more conventionally articulated compositions. But when listened to, they seem to break down into component pieces. The sound decays. Even at the project’s most fully musical, People Skills has the quality of collage. The sensibility and process of collage is especially palpable on Mount Moriah Tocsin. There seems to be an implicit engagement with the surreal, which has always attempted to bring submerged, subterranean and repressed materials into the open, to create a “sur-reality” that refuses to distinguish between the conscious and the unconscious. That also makes a sort of sense, given the fact that Dewlow conceived and recorded most of the tape in an all-but abandoned graveyard, somewhere deep in the wilds of Southwest Philadelphia. He was unearthing something. What emerges is sometimes beautiful, more often difficult, and always deeply affecting.
