Margaret Dygas - How Do You Do (Powershovel Audio, 2010)
From Poland to Los Angeles to New York, London and Berlin. From old-school hip-hop to house, techno and deejay nights at Fabric; playing exhausting twenty-hour spins at Club Der Visionaere and a bi-monthly residency at Berghain/Panorama Bar. Several notable EPs (with Perlon, Contexterrior) later, Margaret Dygas surprises friend and foe alike with her debut ‘How Do You Do’.
It’s the loaded opening line that you don’t know how to answer. It is Margaret Dygas’ interpretation of Desmond Morris’ ‘People Watching’. Human behaviour compressed into music. The most striking quotations become a song. Pure bricolage, scattered ambient jazz structures with a techno undertone. Pianos, broken glass and a tight 4/4 beat. Broken, fractured and slowly building to a climax. A climax that can be found on the dance floor. Where as a human being you demand attention, ‘Veering Intention’. But we get ahead of ourselves.
First we have to put up walls, copy behaviour, imitate and compare our behaviour with that of our fellow human beings. The literature has never been clearer. Science on a spinning disc that pulls you into the rhythm of ‘Salutation’ and ‘Barrier’. A change of rhythm that you don’t expect at first, but later feels natural. Dygas introduces new sounds, breaks with the expectations of a techno track (‘Hidden From View’) and flirts with avant-garde song structures. The book is an afterthought. The music is so overwhelming that you surrender to the voice samples, crackling echoes, twisted melodies and later, unobtrusive beats.
‘How Do You Do’ absorbs you, shatters your slavishness and sends you in new directions. Journeys for the advanced, the challenged, the true believers in the idiosyncratic course that Powershovel Audio sends its artists on.
Released on Powershovel Audio,