Byzantine in structure, Andrew McKenzie’s Dislocation grows in one like a new organ; a second breath. It speaks of a rediscovering after a time of cataclysm. Source sounds, met and recorded at various places over the world, sound and are mixed such that they seem like costumes impregnated with bestial essences, essences which determine, disclose, and direct an array of what might be considered so many secret forces of the universe. As though a sort of dance of the Gods, the proceedings are marked by many a moment when intricately patterned intervals and rapidfire patter come at one from an angle, at a pace, and with an insistence that they sound with all the prodigious effervescence of life. As they accrue momentum and viscosity, culminating in a seismographic fury and granular whirlwind, moving toward a sort of resonant oblivion, its unconditional violence has about it the anguish of one who wishes a return to immanence.
At the same time, as particularly outlined in the knotty, though, as always with McKenzie, fascinating linear notes that exist as a part of the work, spanning excerpts from various religious texts to his own musings, there is a conservative prudence coloring all of this, a consciousness whose crime is its hunt for perfection, which has turned away from its own awkward content, integrating it as just another link in the concatenation of useful works, and deriving static and aesthetic profit from all of these vague forms, which are for it but masses of dead ‘things’. “The best way to kill the past is to explain it,” says Mckenzie. “It appears to breathe new life into it, but it is simply the last twitchings of a corpse.” If this album is ghostly, it’s because it dwells under just such a light. Yet it still doesn’t unfold and collide in an entirely undifferentiated space (unlike numerous other albums in this vein); a magnetic distance obtains most everywhere, hence the albums oftentimes surprisingly fluid and dramatic movement. It is now rough, now bothersome, but always its fathomless depths taunt and challenge one to encroach any further.
Max Schaefer
