Mitchell Akiyama and Tony Boggs create wildly illustrative music bydestroying vocal and instrumental music that they record. Whatseperates this studio-foolery from other projects aimed at makingbeauty out of destroyed sounds is the way the chaos is controlled andshaped perfectly. D?ormais compose songs, plan their moves ahead oftime, and give their dying sounds life by stacking them together and ontop of each other in meaningful ways. It doesn't hurt that all thedrum, piano, string, and vocal parts were recorded by the group andthen disassembled and rearranged by the same people. Regardless of theprocess, the music is absolutely gorgeous. Bits and pieces of slideguitar, piano, and acoustic strumming cascade and flow as one stream ofmusic with each instrument sliding above and submerging beneath thesurface. Violins rattle, pop, hum, and echo throughout the backgroundcreating the illusion that this music must have been created in acathedral dedicated to dead and dying instruments and compositions longabandoned by their composers. The mass of sound is glowingly beautifuland never seems to repeat or ever hints at any patterns that it may bebased on. The creation of the music must've been a long and painfulprocess as no two songs sound alike and each features a variety ofinstrumentation used in various manners. "To Sing Before Going toSleep" is particularly good example of what can be done with awell-written song and an ear for space, silence, and timbres. It driftsso elegantly with mysterious female vocals nearly crying out from theslow flow of crystalline guitar picking and howling, unidentifiableinstruments. Each song sounds as if every second were random, but theresult is so perfect that I think it must've been planned that way. Iambroken...is a blueprint for what can be done with glitchy sounds and a bitcompositional patience. Of course defective sounds can be gorgeous, butthey're magnificent when composed and arranged in a way that feelsfamiliar. In all reality, however, it's truly alien.Read More
