Everyday Dust:
The Green Decay
Sparkwood Records
Any recording pitched as one “inspired by tales of Lovecraftian horror” is one I definitely want to hear, and if Everyday Dust's aptly titled The Green Decay doesn't end up traumatizing the psyche quite as much as a classic Lovecraft tale, it's still disturbing enough. Certainly the cassette release's six congealing tracks often feel like some monstrous entity rising from the diseased depths and are thus suitably Lovecraftian. That being said, one shouldn't perhaps fixate too much on the detail, given that by the composer's own admission, the project, initially conceived to be a musical interpretation of moss and algae, went in a slightly different direction after Everyday Dust consumed Ramsey Campbell's short story collection The Inhabitant Of The Lake and Less Welcome Tenants. It was at that moment that the experimental composer decided to create material that would retain its originally intended scientific focus but now saturated with horror.
There's no shortage of skin-crawling murk and decrepit atmosphere on the fifty-minute release, as Everyday Dust uses all manner of sounds, electronic and otherwise, to evoke damp, shadowy forests filled with deformed entities and poisonous flora. Field recordings, tape effects, analogue synthesizers, organ, vintage keyboards, and transformed sounds are the base materials with which the composer works to generate the unsettling, detail-rich sound paintings. Muffled, horn-like tones, woozy synthesizers, and shuddering organs ooze forth like grotesque convulsions from the forest's center, collectively suggesting the kind of rot that might develop in a natural setting when left to its own devices.
A certain kind of majesty is achieved in “Colossus,” even if of the infected kind, as thick layers of church organ chords and billowing synthesizers merge, suggesting some requiem for the undead as they do so; it's at such moments that the music is at its Lovecraftian best, especially when madness seems as close at hand as it does here. Everyday Dust's penchant for melancholy arises during “Where Light Fails,” whose becalmed presentation brings some semblance of sanity to an otherwise unhinged playlist, while the nadir is arguably reached in the penultimate setting “Roots,” a fourteen-minute trek through swampy terrain accompanied by epic organ chords and tribal percussion effects. Anything but bucolic and pastoral, Everyday Dust's second album for Sparkwood Records conjures an overgrown and out-of-control world where one enters at one's peril.January 2017