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Dim Dim, "Whip"
Much like labelmate Minotaur Shock, Belgium's Dim Dim takes a contrarian and perverse approach to contemporary electronic dance music. Whip is a loopy, absurdist dance party of an album, largely due to Jerry Dimmer's skillful and deranged incorporation of exotica, turntablism, and Negativland-style plunderphonics.
Jerry Dimmer is a former cartoonist, dance music producer, painter, illustrator, and all-around eccentric iconoclast who has been releasing albums since the early nineties. His music is pretty damn unique, although Tipsy seems to be a similarly weird and decadent kindred spirit. However, Dimmer largely eschews lounge-y kitsch and conventional musicality for more demented, ADD-addled deconstructionism.
"Sheena," the first actual song on the album, immediately makes it clear that we're in for a curious and capricious experience. The song has a looping, cartoonish rhythm and is bursting with cut-up gurgles, opera snippets, spacey synths, and other disparate stolen sounds. As with all songs on the album, there is no real melodic repetition or attempt at a conventional “song,” but it is irrelevant because the music is so propulsively bouyant and surreal. The only notable exception is the album's closer “Stippy,” which almost ends with a surprisingly melodic chorus of children’s voices and conventional guitar, but ultimately degenerates into kooky wordless warbling.
The title track has a wonderfully off-kilter pseudo-breakbeat rhythm and incorporates a staggeringly varied arsenal of burgled audio: Oval-esque glitches, random vocal exclamations, cartoon noises, some sitar, laughing children, mangled foreign speech, record-scratching, and possibly a steel band. I am fascinated by the brevity of most of the samples; rather than milk a handful of lengthy snippets, Dimmer opts instead to unleash a torrent of unrelated, unrecognizably splintered, and extremely brief sounds. It must have taken an inordinate amount of time to make this album: this track alone must have at least 18 different sound sources involved and they are all expertly sync-ed with the underlying music.
Aside from his adventurousness and ambition with assembling material, Dimmer conveys an astonishing degree of exactitude and self-awareness. There are very few bad tracks on this album and nearly every song is extremely tight and funky. Obviously, music of this sort has the capacity to be hugely annoying, but Dimmer wisely keeps all the tracks short enough that they don’t over-extend their welcome. This is an inspired and batshit crazy album.
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