Stearns – Golden Town (Spectropol Records)

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Dan Stearns’ Golden Town is a difficult album to listen to. It was born from what Stearns describes as “the cumulative fatigue one acquires grinding the proverbial square peg at a round hole, year after year,” and was developed in rumination and “waking dreams.” The album isn’ hard listening because of any technical deficiency or lack of ideas (quite the opposite) – rather, it feels uncomfortably personal. There is a confronting sense of voyeurism in hearing the inner workings of Stearns’ psyche played out so starkly in his compositions. Particularly where this psyche itself seems ill at ease, the album gives off a discomforting feeling of having delved too far into another person’ life and found things that weren’ meant to be shared.

Stearns suffers from bouts of dissociation, a psychological state in which a person experiences a detachment between their perception and their emotional and conscious reactions to the world. This feeling of detachment snakes its way through the entire album. The sounds and tracks sit against each other in unusual ways and the pieces idle and brood with no rush to develop. Golden Town is all the more personal for its jarring juxtapositions and lack of polish – scribbled electronics, distressed field recordings, ghosts of traditional instruments and murmuring sub-bass all press against one another in cramped acoustic spaces.

Stearns claims the pieces are designed to work in isolation and they do, to a point, but their real interest comes from their placement within the broader context of the album. Part of what makes Golden Town so engrossing (and exhausting) is its lack of any single emotional through-line. The tracks move between a vast number of psychological states from brooding intensity (“Sigmate’) to out and out violence (“Pileus’) to journalistic detachment (“BLUEwallREDroseBROWNdoor’). Emerging from the overcast atmosphere of the rest of the album, the title track plays out a naive mix of chiming strings and cartoon gun sounds. It is a beautiful, childlike moment that only works as well as it does for its unexpected arrival amongst the harrowing inner spaces of the rest of the release.

A big part of Golden Town’ success is its refusal to cooperate. The album defies expectation or categorisation by shifting between wildly different aesthetic and emotional positions with little sense of narrative. There are almost no clear melodies or pulses to give a foothold in the abstraction. Though this makes for a difficult listen, it also feels incredibly authentic. Stearns hasn’ censored or regulated his output toward some overarching sound; he has simply shared the sounds he has made in their raw and vulnerable state. It’s a long way from being pleasant (and I certainly don’ feel like listening to it again soon) but Golden Town is frequently moving, constantly interesting and occasionally poignant.

Henry Andersen

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