People Skills — Hum of the Non-Engine (Digital Regress)
Hum Of The Non-Engine by People Skills
Philadelphia likes its music noisy.Bardo Pond kicked off a wave of fuzz, grime, and mixed fidelity is hazy in the early 1990s.Philly heads like Tom Lax with his Siltbreeze label champion the out-rock chaos and broken signals emanating from the “cradle of liberty.”Lax and others have sussed out most of the city’s sonic sewer dwellers including Jesse Dewlow, who records solo as People Skills.Dewlow is unique in the Philly scene in that he comes across as a downtrodden recluse, content to coax a molasses-thick gloom cocktail from his damaged implements.He’s not rockin’ out; he’s wading through a knee-deep murk.Unsure of his destination Dewlow is concentrating on the voyage, putting one unsure foot in front of the other and wending his way.
People Skills’ closest contemporary analog sound-wise is the Californian duo German Army.Both projects are relatively enigmatic.Not many people know who is behind GA, and it’s almost impossible to find a photo of Jesse Dewlow online.They also employ similar palettes: guitars, an almost monotone vocal, broken synths and samples.The primary difference is that Dewlow seems to draw influence from Gate and The Shadow Ring, whereas GA are acolytes of Throbbing Gristle and early Nocturnal Emissions.Dewlow’s oeuvre is more experimental tinkerer than it is proto-industrial stoic.
Dewlow’s Siltbreeze LP Tricephalic Head arrived in 2014 and was straightforward and song-oriented in nature as far as People Skills material goes.Subsequent releases spanned the spectrum between morose bedroom incantations and noisy, ramshackle Rube Goldberg constructions.Hum of the Non-Engine is a grab bag of these modalities, the best of all Dewlow’s personalities.There are both highly conceptual mood pieces and mutant pop gems on display.“The Library Is on Fire” is an example of the more outré side of People Skills, its intertwined layers of gurgling synths and detuned strings drifting artfully and with an off-kilter stride.Dewlow flips the script and becomes a songsmith on “Flag for Gravity.”Complete with a lumbering drum machine rhythm, the song wouldn’t be out of place on a slowcore band’s demo tape.
The short noise piece “Oval House” leads into the haunting “Thinking Back Through our Mothers,” a gloomy electroacoustic construction.Barely heard conversations bleed into an unsettling moan that feels rather uncanny when paired with the pretty melody that Dewlow layers on top.A Sentridoh-esque ditty closes out the first side of the LP, and on the flip Dewlow continues exploring the many facets of lo-fi bedroom spirit-summoning.The mood appears to lighten, which is relative when discussing People Skills’ music, but the tempo remains leisurely throughout the remainder of the album.Dewlow masterfully balances alien atmospheres with recognizable signifiers and dispatches these strange missives at a pace that makes Hum of the Non-Engine a captivating listen.His Philly noise is delivered slowly, one moody piece at a time.
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.
