Goldicot Culls The Week - XIV

by Goldicot

Sat, 24 May 2025

Read in 3 minutes

You’re listening to it wrong

weekly

One recurrent failure in my theory of mind of others is how those who don’t like weird music think of their taste. “Oh boy, can’t wait to find more stuff that sounds exactly like what I’ve already heard.” Maybe it’s like action movie fans never tire of exploding gibs and foley meat punches? Even then, I’m looking for something new and clever in the choreography or design, if I’ve seen it before, it holds less appeal. I suspect it’s probably like how eating spicy food works – if you have less capsaicin receptors on your tongue, you can eat hotter and hotter food without as much pain. It’s often theorized this is correlated with a decrease in the nuance of said taste. I’m going to restaurants and ordering nine alarm chili because I can’t appreciate the difference between a red bell pepper or a green bell pepper. Or maybe that’s the popular recurrent failure in the theory of mind for people like me? Now if only it was as easy to consistently find weird music as it is to find spicy food. Speaking of spicy, here are three dishes that you’ve likely had something similar before. Taste like theory of mind?

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37 minutes of unstoppable drive; a momentum that simply doesn’t quit. Each instrument works tirelessly to propel the others forward, and this engine barrels straight through pop chorus, shred solo, and propulsive melodeath alike. Guest graced by all-time vocalists Christian Älvestam and Björn Strid, further adorned by brief features from Per Nilsson and Christian Amott, Buried Realm feels uncannily like an all-star superproject, somehow it’s the solo work of mere mortal Josh Dummer, boasting enough talent herein to quake the legendary titans. A modern technical melodic death metal classic neck-and-neck with the greats.

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Out of all the genres to write in vain about, free jazz has to be the most futile. Accordingly, I will keep this brief. In this partial old Pyrrhon reunion, Dylan DiLella and Alex Cohen have a lively conversation of exclusively dissonant rays and chromatic aberrations. Perhaps Radiance refers to the twisted shapes conjured here, and then cast like light over different responses, different angles, watching the forms mutate, explode into torrential color, or simply disappear. DiLella was a member of Yowie for an unknown period of time – perhaps these are the remnants, and how splendid they are.

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This is, in three ways, the thinking man’s funeral. The first is the way of Mizmor, the wanderer imprisoned, trapped in the confines of language and reason, left to futile journeys from ruin to ruin. The second is the way of Hell, red all over in pain and suffering, despairing and ruined. Perhaps one leads to the other, or perhaps they are already one and the same. Both acts have built modern masterworks of monolithic doom, inexorably rising on the horizon on an endless inevitable approach. They are deep echoes of one another, and now together, frighteningly similar, indistinguishable in unison. I think of this work as a meditation retreat at the base of a vast and ancient ruin. Strip away the artifice of sensation and language and return to awareness and realize you, too, are the ruin. That is the third way. The uncomfortable truth that was present at the start is also the wry joke at the end. But there may be hope in the ellipsis – alluvion means the expanding shore, built up by the water. We, too, are built up by the ruins.