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Mount Moriah Tocsin (2019 c47, Alien Passengers)

by People Skills

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about

Material originally released as 50 limited edition cassettes on Alien Passengers.

Performed and recorded at the cemetery by Jesse Dewlow October 2018.
Tracks A4, A5 and 3B recorded elsewhere.
Track 6B dedicated to and recorded at the funeral ceremony of Anthony M. Roque.

Photograph from the Alfred P. Sebastian Archives 1969-1995.

Thanks Mike Collino

credits

released July 8, 2019

I think Jesse Dewlow is sick. Not “sick” as an exclamation (“sick set, bro!”), but sick as in physically ill. Dewlow makes music that sounds unhealthy. Listening to the oozing amorphous song-like sound blobs on these two tapes, I’m transported back to my childhood in the late 1970s, when I had to stay home from school with a fever, drifting in and out of unrestful sleep while my mother had daytime television running a few rooms away. I could hear teevee conversations (game shows? daytime soap operas?) or maybe my mom on the phone with friends, but filtered through a painful headache, persistent nausea, boredom and in between consciousness. That’s what this recalls for me. Dewlow, the man behind People Skills (an ironic name for music this defiantly
unfriendly), deserves commendation for coming up with a sound so potentially alienating… clearly, he has a vision and a specific, unique voice.
The more abstract of these two tapes, “Mount Moriah Tocsin”, reminds me of a bit of Sandoz Lab Technicians or CJA. It begins with “Diamond Ring”, a relatively songlike blob with a tin-can drum
box tapping away and loops so raw they sound like they were recorded onto masking tape. Dewlow’s vocals are delivered in a mush-mouthed monotone from beneath a crushing fog of room tone rumble and negative-fidelity hiss. Behind the obtuse nods toward song, form is a stream of errant chatter from an unrelated conversation. Maybe this is the single? From that opening number, a sense of deflated sadness sets in. A melancholy organ takes the lead as someone works on a carpentry project (maybe drilling wood and building a table?) in the same room that Dewlow happens to be recording in. That shuffle of mundane extraneous incidental motion persists throughout the album, acting as a sort of anchor as the seasick loops degrade and warp… I hear ocean waves (on “Harboring Criminals”, which opens side 2), the wind blowing on a microphone, the clicks of someone shifting in their chair. The atmosphere is one of a private performance that the listener is surreptitiously eavesdropping on. And then the album ends with a major catharsis: a full-sounding church organ and chanting punctuated by synth crackle. Suddenly, People Skills swings open the windows and doors and lets in cleansing daylight.
-Howard Stelzer, Vital Weekly

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.
-Jonathan Shaw, Dusted Magazine

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