Earth holds trauma and there are consequences

The easy read of Álvaro Domene's DARVO MACHINÆ III, the trilogy's final installment, is that the New York/Madrid composer's first two volumes teach you how to listen to it. The better read is that III teaches you how to listen to the others. It's like watching Primer a second time: Go back to DARVO MACHINÆ I with these eight songs freshly loaded into your memory, and the exploded-jazz guitar runs and hanging drones, battered by a rock slide of IDM beat boulders, snap into focus. It's a heck of a reveal, turning subtext into text, what was previously heard as scenery into main characters. The narrative flow was always stitched in there. Now you can hear the seams.

What sets DARVO MACHINÆ III apart from anything loud you'll hear this year is that it achieves its hindsight highlighting through subtraction. Instead of piling on layers, the songs mostly pull back to a comparatively spartan sound design, choosing subtlety rather than over-explaining the inner workings. The component parts are there, and that's it. Opener "Reactionary Rot," for instance, picks up the Autechre-in-a-blender beats and spooky, seemingly disembodied guitar arpeggios that have defined the trilogy. It's not a repeat, though. The beats' twisted timbres kick things off with a jump scare, then the track lets the guitars wander like Fredrik Thordendal through the cosmos before closing with a sound like an office copier death-chugging its way through its final print job. DARVO MACHINÆ III is all of a piece, and still new.

Let's talk about isolation. In a way, DARVO MACHINÆ III is like Rauschenberg erasing the de Kooning, taking the ear-tickling busyness of past compositions and condensing them down to two or three prominent points of interest. What remains is so singular that it not only demands your attention, but recalibrates your perception of DARVO MACHINÆ I and II, like how a suggestion can flip an optical illusion. It's like, "Hey, here are the things you should be listening for," the circled Where's Waldo of experimental, avant-garde-everything music. There's no other way to write it: It's neat!

The songs are, of course, neat, too. "Wolf's Exegesis" (about someone I can't quite put my finger on) is a spacey drift contrasted with noise burbles that sound like the universe crumpling tinfoil in your ear. "Hope As a Terrible Tactic" is like scanning the radio dial and never finding a clear signal, even though every station plays the same guitar solo. "In the Direction of Conflict" might as well be the result of hooking biosonification electrodes to two rival ferns as they hurl whatever the verdant equivalent of abuse is at each other.

And yet, even though DARVO MACHINÆ III is partly about focusing the lens, nothing prepares you for "The Ally Industrial Complex," which is as close as this series gets to something that could make it into a dance DJ's setlist. A steady-ish beat arrives, lightly dubby in the Four Tet sense. Then the back half feels like Godflesh remixing Daft Punk, or even the other way around. The effect of it popping up after two-plus hours of the entire trilogy's demanding, disorienting music is like the rising sun after a hard night, the hug after a long trial. "Hey, you made it."

Or did you? What keeps bringing you back to DARVO MACHINÆ is that all these songs can be interpreted in myriad ways. Is "The Ally Industrial Complex" a job well done for surviving the skronk gauntlet, or is it, as the title may imply, something more insidious, like how allyship is often wielded as a velvet cudgel of false goodwill when corporations attach themselves to something like Pride? Pulling back, the trilogy as a whole has this fascinating dualism, encapsulating the internal and external at the same time. It's almost like an aural treatise on how the two interact: one's emotions and thinking influence the perception of the external, while the world also informs the internal. The joy of Domene is that the artist offers no answer, and the musical elements aren't forced into either box. Are the scampering beats and noise a deluge of thoughts driving ADHD side quests, or the world's infinite waves of stimuli attacking one's serenity?

Domene doesn't hold your hand there, which is so at odds with how contemporary popular art is meant to be consumed, where every twist is chosen by market-tested data. And that may be DARVO MACHINÆ's greatest contradiction: It's so in tune with how today's maddeningly hectic world feels, while also being, as a piece of art, the world we'd rather be in right now. It's like using the thing you're taking refuge from as refuge. There are few things like it. That's why you'll play DARVO MACHINÆ again. – Ian Chainey [AKA Wolf Rambatz linktr.ee/wrambatz ]