In 2005 Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom released Days of Mars, a suite of sprawling, futuristic soundscapes played on Gavin Russom’s home-built synthesizers and recorded live onto tape. While sparsely praised at the time, the album has held up remarkably well, enough so that DFA decided to press a single of a previously unreleased track culled from those sessions.
From the start, Gonzalez and Russom were unfortunately pegged as a revival act. That label may be apt, but it reduces what makes their work compelling. Days of Mars certainly owed much to earlier electronic music, especially the German "kosmische" artists of the '70s. Nonetheless, Gonzalez and Russom brought a powerful, dramatic sensibility that distinguished them from their influences. Now that younger groups such as Emeralds and Oneohrix Point Never are mining the same territory to slightly more critical acclaim, arguments against retro-futurism have, for the time being, abated somewhat. Yet it’s the quality of the music, and not a shift in the fashion cycle, that makes "Track 5" seem timely, even though it was made more than five years ago.
The piece begins with a trebly one-note pulse. Through the following twelve minutes, the pulse mutates, steadily gaining and losing notes. Subtle bass tones and rubbery keyboard melodies appear to fill the composition out until we, the listeners, are surrounded by a multitude of shifting patterns, dancing like sheets of windblown rain illuminated by neon lights. A guitar cuts-in mid-song, playing a simple three note-riff—its dialed back, slightly distorted sound blending in well with the electronic sounds swirling around it.
Although Delia and Gavin have ceased working together, "Track 5" will hopefully raise the group’s posthumous reputation. At least as far as one modest 12" single can do. For his part, Gavin Russom has continued to make innovative electronic music under the monikers Black Metoric Star and the Crystal Ark. What all three projects share is a meditative almost spiritual dedication to sound construction. Gonzalez and Russom’s music may seem at first rickety and coldly machinelike, but underneath everything is a continuous pulse that is undeniably human.
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