MAUSOLEI - ANONYMITÄT
Review by Snarling Clearing
The cover of MAUSOLEI’s latest album, ANONYMITÄT, like those of some of his earlier covers, features an Escher-like architectural fantasy. We encounter in this structure a unique totality, a sort of Ouroboros in the center of this yellowed-old nothingness. This image is a fitting one for ANONYMITÄT, which is itself something of a totality. It is consistent all throughout in the sense that every track on the album is related in texture to any other given track—that warm tape’s hiss, that low and menacing synth which is here and there accompanied or altogether eclipsed by the ghostly high notes that ring and hover above and around it like will-o’-the-wisps over a dark swamp—and this textural unity produces a satisfying feeling of completeness by the end of it. It’s a much darker album than the previous one, LETZTE WORTE, which came out in June of last year and had a more sullen and bittersweet quality to it whereas this album has a more sinister edge to it. It’s a dark monolith of that unmistakably lo-fi dungeon sound coming from Phoenix, Arizona USA, called MAUSOLEI.
One should not mistake my description of the album as consistent with saying that every track on it sounds the same as the other. Though sonically related in texture to the others, each track has its own overall tone, evokes different things. And the opacity of the titles (in all caps they remain somewhat static and removed from the sound material) leaves the imagination to conjure up its own imagery. In its increasing familiarity the sound itself may seem to shape-shift in the mind’s eye throughout the duration of the album: That hiss that feels like walking through a dense fog surrounding the solemn and specter-like synths in VERRAT becomes the sound of a waterfall on a mountainside one scales in UNTERKÜHLUNG. In this way, the music is free of any constraint, free to evoke any image or feeling or memory in the listener as it washes over him or her.
Despite the range in tone—from the somber to the ominous—there is no awkward disparity in sound here, no disjointedness. Each track seems as if to grow out of the one before it, organically (not unlike the structures in the albums’ illustrations). This is not just some old bunch of songs thrown together and forced into connection, thematic or otherwise; here, they compose a signature sound with varying expressions. One can immediately recognize and differentiate a track by MAUSOLEI from those of other Dungeon Synth artists—his sound truly is his own—and this is no less true on ANONYMITÄT. And so, in my opinion, ANONYMITÄT deserves praise as one of the best new releases of the year so far and among the go-to records for lo-fi Dungeon Synth.
My favorite track would have to be UNTERKÜHLUNG. It’s one of the darker tracks on the album—second to SALPETER—and, given its spot in the middle of the record, I would describe it as something like the fulcrum of the album.