DODOBROBRO is a seemingly elusive experimental industrial/electronica musician(s), their newest release entitled CLEARING having come out this March on New Orleans based label Pinkbox Teleport. This release includes a lot of drone/noise tunes which are chopped up into berating and disorienting rhythms. The release changes pace quickly at times shifting to tunes of unexpected flavors – such as the Juke influence in the Death Grips Culture Shock remix. Though this track was a bit out of place among the other harsher textures brought to the table in other tracks in this release, the remix serves as a nice break in pace at the beginning of the album. To me it almost feels like an oddly placed interlude-and I like that.
DODOBROBRO gets bonus points for originality all around. CLEARING is very stream of consciousness, constantly changing in a very maximalist fashion, new sections either glitch into existence or rise slowly like a tide until the previous sound is simply drowned into oblivion. Everything is overstated, and it’s nice, the blown out quality of the sounds gives the whole experience a fuzzy feeling and the violent rhythms a seriously calming undertone. This calm tone becomes a stronger theme towards the end of the release, especially in one of my favorite tracks on the release called “Lulu“, which uses harsh drum samples but is slow and held up mainly by a slow whining string instrument and piano sample that is both haunting and pleasant.
DODOBROBRO is good at drawing his audience into a solid loop that can vary subtly for a long time and then change drastically, yet still maintain a drugged out hypnotic rhythm. This half struggle half symbiosis between violence and bliss definitely lends itself to the album’s vague yet poetic concept which is stated by DODOBROBRO in a quote at the bottom of the Bandcamp page for CLEARING.
“This album is an attempt to devaluate the tormenting controversies of binary oppositions such as good and evil, calmness and anxiety, noise and melody etc. It is also for people trying to discern their reflection in chaotic flood of input data, trying to separate the wheat from the weeds. There is ridiculously graceful dodo in the after dark concrete jungles and you may kill it or save it.”
– DODOBROBRO
As a whole I think this is a really successful and beautiful release and I look forward to seeing more of DODOBROBRO’s work in the future.
