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Aaron Dilloway

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John Cage/Aaron Dilloway, “Rozart Mix” (Hanson, 2024)

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In 1965, John Cage “composed” a piece for Alvin Lucier that debuted at Brandeis University’s then-new Rose Art Museum (Lucier was employed as Brandeis’s chorus director at the time). The score for the piece was characteristically Cage-ian, as it was essentially just “correspondence and notes regarding the preparation of magnetic tape” and left plenty of room for chance and spontaneity to play significant roles. While Cage settled upon a total of 88 loops to mirror the number of keys on a piano, the contents and length of those loops were left very open-ended (as was the duration of the piece itself, as its beginning and ending were determined by the arrival and departure of the audience). There was also an element of mischief to the piece as well, as Cage’s original vision included loops as long as 45 feet that stretched over a fountain and also included instructions for what to do when some of the loops inevitably broke mid-performance. Unsurprisingly, performances of “Rozart Mix” are quite rare for those reasons, but Aaron Dilloway was recently lucky enough to land the time and resources necessary to perform his own personalized interpretation and there is literally no one on earth who could be better suited for such an endeavor.

This album’s origins date back to 2020, as Dilloway was contacted by the John Cage Trust and Acra, NY’s Wave Farm about staging a fresh performance of the piece. The following year, Dilloway spent “a wonderful and intense week” at Bard College researching Cage’s notes and materials, then performed a 6-hour version at the Trust with the assistance of Rose Actor-Engel, Twig Harper, C. Lavender, Quintron, Robert Turman, and John Wiese. According to Dilloway, the performance involved “12 individually amplified reel to reel tape machines, placed around multiple floors of a house, playing 88 tape loops spliced together by 5 to 175 splices” and “created an overwhelming and joyous environment of cacophonous sound.” Amusingly, that performance just leapt to the top of my ever-expanding list of “missed concert” regrets, as I used to live a mere 10 minutes from Bard College. Alas. On the bright side, the durational constraints of vinyl have distilled that performance to a mere 16 minutes of surrealist magic that I can now experience at home. It is certainly less immersive and hypnotic than a 6-hour dose would be, but the new brevity imbues the piece with the “all killer, no filler” feel of a great noise set, so I am definitely not complaining.

For lack of a better term, the blurting and heaving sounds collected on the tapes tend to be non-musical ones. In fact, the album’s second half is broken down into excerpts from the individual tapes so they can be heard outside their chaotic and hallucinatory context, but there are still not many obviously recognizable sounds and even those are sped-up, slowed-down, or chopped up in such a kaleidoscopic fashion that they sound like a cross between a tape being eaten and a car crash. In the context of the piece itself, however, all of the fragmented moving parts lock into a wonderfully lurching and convulsive rhythm that feels like a heaving juggernaut spraying sparks everywhere as it tenaciously lumbers forward. To my ears, the overall effect lies somewhere between a clockwork Frankenstein’s monster of jabbering, skittering, and crunching chaos, the audio from a hundred hours of Looney Tunes cartoons happening all at once, and an imagined classic Nurse With Wound album (or at least an inspired mutation of Coil’s “Disco Hospital”). In short, it sounds absolutely deranged in the best possible way, as its more nightmarish tendencies are beautifully balanced with playfully cartoonish ones like oinking pigs and a squeaky toy (or possibly a cartoon squirrel). Also, having listened to excerpts from a couple of previous performances, I can safely say that Dilloway’s version is a refreshingly radical and unique one, as the feel of the piece changes dramatically depending on variables like speed and the number of splices. This one is definitely on the fast and choppy end of the spectrum and it is absolutely glorious because of it.

There are plenty of ambitiously avant-garde conceptual pieces from the mid-20th century that sound tragically academic or dated now, but Dilloway has given this one a thrilling new life, as this version sounds vibrantly alive, endearingly maniacal, and punk as fuck. Which is exactly how I would want a new Aaron Dilloway album to sound.

Listen here.

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Body/Dilloway/Head (Three Lobed, 2021)

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Past experience has taught me not to get too excited about promising-sounding collaborations between great artists, but the allure of this particular project was admittedly damn hard to resist: Body/Head is consistently the most provocative and intense of Sonic Youth’s descendants and Aaron Dilloway seems absolutely incapable of releasing a disappointing album these days. Still, there is never any way to predict which threads will assert their dominance when distinctive visions collide, so there are a number of possible shapes that this album could have taken. 

To my ears, it is Dilloway’s broken, murky, and obsessively looping aesthetic that mostly steers the ship, but the balance between the three artists is sufficiently unpredictable and shifting to make this trio feel like something quite different from either Dilloway’s solo work or past Body/Head releases. Matt Krefting already did a fine job of summarizing the trio’s shared vision with “over and over one gets the sense that the music is trying to wake itself from a dream,” but it is also more than that, as this trio have a real knack for slowly transforming gnarled and challenging introductory themes into unexpected passages of sublime beauty.

The album is comprised of two longform pieces separated by a shorter piece (“Goin’ Down”) and each one feels like a different direction or even an entirely different band. In fact, the album art does a remarkably great job at conveying what the music is like: a handful of recognizable elements chopped up and re-assembled into a nearly unrecognizable abstraction. The opening “Body/Erase” is the most “Dilloway” of the three songs, as it features a long, slow fade in of subtly oscillating drone and warped tape warbles that feel like an unsettling dream where conversations are slowed and smeared into something inscrutable and vaguely sinister. Gradually, the gnarled tape loop fragment become more frequent and violent, blossoming into a jabbering, splattering phantasmagoria that starts to become even more unhinged shortly after the nine-minute mark with the appearance of an ugly repeating buzz and an insistent pedal tone from Nace’s guitar. Once all the elements are in place, “Body/Erase” becomes a massive, seething juggernaut of layered cacophony.

In the wake of that slow-burning tour de force, some more recognizable and expected elements surface with “Goin’ Down,” which initially sounds like a classic Sonic Youth single that has been stretched and deconstructed into abstraction. I dig the repeating howl of warbling guitar noise, but the real payoff is the squelching, wobbly, and ruined reverie of the final minute. The album then ends with its wildest, most go-for-broke piece, as the shapeshifting 13-minute epic “Secret Cuts” alternately sounds like the slow boinging of a massive cosmic spring, a noise guitar show frozen in looping suspended animation, and the hushed voice of an angel speaking from inside my head (“do you want?” is the only phrase that I can reliably make out). 

Some of the transitions between segments can be a little jarring (purposely, I presume), but all of the segments themselves are compelling and lead to a lovely set piece of warm, swelling drones and flickering voice fragments. It is damn lovely while it lasts, but an earlier noise guitar motif unexpectedly claws its way back from the grave to end the piece on an ugly, gnarled note. I cannot say that I am particularly surprised that Nace and Gordon were so game to let Dilloway drag their vision through a meat grinder or that the end result was so good, yet I was legitimately caught off guard by the ephemeral oases of beauty that occasionally surface. While this can admittedly be a prickly, difficult, and potentially room-clearing album at times, it is also a singular and unusually memorable release for all involved (no mean feat, given the massive, highlight-filled discography of the trio).

Samples can be found here.

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Aaron Dilloway & Lucrecia Dalt, “Lucy & Aaron” (Hanson, 2021)

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The underground/experimental music world is full of promising-sounding collaborations that yield underwhelming or half-baked results, but Lucy & Aaron is a wonderfully refreshing exception to that recurring phenomenon. Part of that success is likely due to the pair’s long history together, as they have been fans of each other’s work (and close friends) since meeting at a festival in Madeira back in 2010. Moreover, Dalt and Dilloway have actually inspired and impacted each other’s work over the years, which probably went a long way in setting the stage for such a natural-sounding and symbiotic blurring together of visions. 

As Dalt puts it, “we crossed our signals, sometimes his affecting mine, or the other way around, we just wanted to make a fun, weird and inevitably emotive record that somehow captured so many things we love about music.” Naturally, Dilloway’s endearingly disorienting and creepy tape loops tend to be the foundation for much of the album, as Dalt’s own backdrops tend to be quite stark and minimal. The mood of the album is quite a bit different from typical Dilloway fare, however, as Dalt’s melodic influence transforms his obsessively repeating fragments of simmering psychotropic weirdness into a broken and playfully warped “pop” album like no other.

The best summation I can come up with for this album’s aesthetic is that it sounds like Lucrecia Dalt’s already frayed and alien-sounding pop was fed through a nightmare machine set somewhere between “Kafkaesque” and “arty giallo film.” There is nothing that feels outright malevolent or violent, but there is also nothing familiar and nearly all of it feels unsettling and disturbingly tactile. The songs are roughly structured like pop songs, as there are vocal melodies, grooves, and sometimes even hook-like approximations of a chorus, yet all of it feels unrecognizably grimy, broken, and obsessive in a host of intriguing ways. 

The entire album is a creepily surreal delight, as it is hard to imagine a single piece that could not be someone’s favorite, but my current personal favorites are “The Blob,” “Niles Baroque,” and several of the weirdly beautiful psych-inspired pieces that come near the end of the album. “The Blob” is probably the album’s most unexpected surprise, as it sounds like Pat Benatar made a dreampop album for 4AD but a deranged dub producer got his hands on it and replaced the entire rhythm section with one of those little wind-up monkeys with a drum. 

“Niles Baroque” is similarly melodic (there are even dual vocal harmonies), but the groove is centered on a lurching bass throb that feels viscerally gelatinous. Those two pieces, along with treble-ravaged and industrial-damaged single “Demands Of Ordinary Devotion,” are the ones where Dalt and Dilloway’s aesthetics most seamlessly combine into curdled pop pleasures, but I am also a huge fan of the outliers that feel like something I would not expect from either artist. 

The best of those is probably “Tense Cuts,” which sounds like a collaboration between a factory, a locked groove of church organ motif, an ASMR recording, and a broken speaker, but there are some even more unlikely moments that approximate a grim Russian ballroom dance (“Voyria”) or fleetingly resemble ’80s Legendary Pink Dots (“The Tunnel”). I could easily write a paragraph about every single piece here though, as each slithering tendril of this unholy pop union is memorable, unique, and unexpected in some way. Lucy & Aaron is absolutely going to be all over “best of 2021” lists this December (my own included).

Samples can be found here.

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Aaron Dilloway, “Switches” (Cejero, 2017)

The wonderfully unsettling and playfully creepy The Gag File deservedly got a lot of attention last year, but Aaron Dilloway also quietly released another excellent album on a small Dutch label in the late fall. While less audacious and considerably less intent on evoking some kind of sad, wobbly, and hissing nightmare world, Switches is still a wonderfully bizarre, distinctive, and obsessive-sounding album. In fact, the sickly, frayed, and hypnotic locked groove-style loops of Switches almost feel like a perverse prelude to The Gag File, relentlessly repeating gnarled and disorienting snatches of half-melodies to peel away the last vestiges of sanity to prime me for the malevolent and Ligotti-esque funhouse to come.

The opening piece, “Switch 2,” sets a very clear tone for the album: for the most part, Switches is a very cryptic, inhuman, and “industrial” affair, resembling the work of a battery of squelching and clanking machines. There is a quite a bit of variety and character to be found in Dilloway’s mechanized lunacy, however. “Switch 2,” for example, sounds like a pile-up of manically repeating tape loops of loudly sputtering belts and pulsing presses. 

There are a number of layers to Dilloway’s artistry, however, as Switches is far more than some ingeniously collaged field recordings, as tapes have an unwavering tendency to wind up considerably more erratic, jabbering, and ragged-sounding than they did before Aaron got his hands on them. In this case, for example, Dilloway evokes a factory where all the rusted, weary, and struggling machinery unexpectedly wrests itself from its moorings and turns on the workers.

The following “Switch 17,” however, is considerably less abrasive and hostile, unfolding as an endlessly repeating snatch of echoing backwards melody. That motif certainly has an appealingly eerie beauty, but that is only part of the picture, as Dilloway devotes most of his energies to the textures: it sounds like a skipping record being played through a malfunctioning receiver and blown-out speakers. The first side of the album is closed out with the starker and more percussive “Switch 15,” a throbbing and pummeling rhythmic miasma of hollow pulses and visceral, distorted snarls. The overarching theme throughout the entire side is that of tape loop experimentation gone sick and wrong, albeit in a unexpectedly listenable way. I suspect no one picks up an Aaron Dilloway album in search of haunting piano melodies, but they turn up here anyway.

The second half of album keeps the rhythmic momentum going, yet takes it in a more somewhat more playful direction…at first. The lengthy “Switch 11-12” initially opens with a surprisingly light pinging and skipping “locked groove” motif, but it slowly becomes increasingly bolstered with mechanized heft and winds up as a shuddering and crunching juggernaut that moves tirelessly forward like a tank. It is hard to say exactly when “Switch 11” segues into “Switch 12,” yet the piece gradually takes on the visceral and vaguely hostile feel of a power electronics performance, as a dense mass of oscillating machine noise takes over and Dilloway occasionally delves into reverberating metal percussion and something resembling distorted vocal howls. That show of force proves to be ephemeral though, as the bulk of the piece is devoted primarily to making subtle shifts in the massive, shuddering industrial rhythm (as well as some not so subtle ones).

Basically, Dilloway treats a cacophony of looped machine noise like a techno producer would juggle high-hats and kick drums in a bangin’ new party jam (only Dilloway is not trying to fill a dancefloor so much as he is intend on finding new ways to grind and lurch). The album comes to an uncharacteristically melodic close with the piano-based “Switch 1,” which beautifully blurs together a looping harp-like arpeggio with backwards bass tones to weave something weirdly hypnotic and phantasmal. It feels like I am watching a flickering scene from a ’50s horror movie (most likely one featuring a haunted castle or a haunted island), yet the projector has gotten stuck and the image is endlessly skipping and starting to burn. By the end, the piece has deteriorated into utter unrecognizability, which is the only appropriate way for this album to end: a slow fade of gnarled, sickly sounding reels played on a dying machine that is increasingly unable to maintain even a semblance of the right speed.

Naturally, any album assembled from distressed and wiggly snatches of tape is destined to have a constrained palette, which is probably the sole caveat here: Dilloway’s vision is undeniably driven by his choice of tools.I personally do not consider that a problem at all, as Dilloway has constrained himself quite squarely in my (dis)comfort zone. As far as tape loop-based experimentation is concerned, Dilloway’s recent work is easily among the most entertaining and inventive fare that I have heard. Also, obsessively repeated looping patterns are exactly the sort of thing that I am drawn to like a moth. There are a number of folks that have made stellar work in that vein (Jason Lescalleet, William Basinski, The Loop Orchestra, Tape Loop Orchestra, etc.) and they all bring something unique to it. 

Dilloway’s own uniqueness lies in his deeply and intuitively deviant sensibility: this is arguably noise, but it is much more absorbing and fun than noise tends to be. An appreciation for the finer points of ugliness, decay, and black humor are such a fundamental part of Dilloway’s character that he can eschew raw power entirely and dwell instead on nuance and atmosphere without losing any bite. Switches is not a threat to unseat The Gag File as Dilloway’s definitive artistic statement of the year, but that is only because its lacks the gleefully macabre thematic hook of its predecessor. Viewed solely on the strength of the material, Switches is almost every bit as essential.

Listen here.

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Aaron Dilloway, “The Gag File” (Dais, 2017)

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Since releasing two stellar albums in 2012, Aaron Dilloway has been comparatively quiet, contenting himself with a steady stream of cassettes, collaborations, and reissues. Apparently, he also spent a bit of that time slowly assembling The Gag File, the long-awaited follow-up opus to Modern Jester. Given that Dilloway has long been one of the most influential figures in the American noise scene, it is no surprise that The Gag File is a bizarre, aberrant, and fine album. 

That said, some aspects were still deliciously wrong-headed enough to catch me off-guard (though the cover art should have been a fair warning). At its best, The Gag File transcends mere noise entirely and ventures into realms that feel like a vivid kitschy nightmare or the infernal horror of an endless bad party.

The opening “Ghost” presents a somewhat muted introduction to Dilloway’s haunted funhouse, as it is initially little more than a soundscape built from industrial-sounding drones and flanging washes of synthesizer. There is certainly some low-level dissonance and menace right from the jump, but the bottom does not drop out until its drugged and lurching groove blossoms into a brief interlude of garbled and distorted vocals, like someone struggling (and failing) to be heard from the spirit world. 

The following piece, “Karaoke With Cal,” is where the album first catches fire. Again, Dilloway returns to voices, this time using a pitch-shifted tape that sounds like an incoherent and upset elderly man delivering a halting monologue over a broken, locked-groove waltz (of sorts). There is also a whistling interlude (also of sorts) that sometimes sounds more like a space-y Theremin solo. All of the individual components are certainly great, but the genius of the piece lies in what Dilloway does with his warped palette, weaving a thoroughly disorienting spell with layering, obsessive repetition, shifts in tape speed, and a distorting patina of hiss and crackle.

In a blackly funny bit of sequencing magic, “Cal” segues into the sounds of sirens and a screaming, fleeing crowd in “Inhuman Form Reflected.” After the initial hysteria, “Inhuman Form” settles into a rhythm that sounds like a room full of wheezing, buzzing antique machines…before unexpectedly erupting into an amusing final act of gibbering monster howls…followed by yet another final act that sounds like a man having a complete psychotic breakdown in an empty room. 

Dilloway is quite a wizard at riding the line between black humor and catharsis, seeming to delight in freezing the smile on listeners’ faces, a trait I find very endearing. The album’s first side then winds to a close with a simmering and rumbling loop pile-up (“Born in a Maze”) that resembles an earthquake that gradually transforms into a distorted locked-groove snippet of a prog rock song.

The album’s second half begins in sublimely creepy fashion with “It’s Not Alright,” an obsessive and hallucinatory loop of soulful overlapping voices repeating the mantra of “It’s Alright” over a simmering bed of hiss and a slowly swelling pulse that sounds like a macabre parade. In yet another feat of sequencing brilliance, that piece seamlessly blurs into “No Eye Sockets (For Otto and Cindy),” which sounds like a gently tweaked field recording of a bunch of laughing office workers chatting inanely and enjoying happy hour as funky blues rock plays in the background. Near the end, the music seems to start again from the beginning and the laughter becomes a bit more sinister and echoing. 

I definitely expected the existentialist hell to pointedly and mischievously continue for much longer, but Dilloway abruptly bulldozes the whole scene with the manic, blown-out Latin-dance-party-meets-industrial-machinery-and-an-erratic-tape-player confusion of “Switch.” Eventually that nerve-jangling cacophony grinds to a halt, but Dilloway replaces it with the similarly discordant “Shot Nerves,” which drags the momentum down to a sickly crawl. Initially, it is one of the weaker pieces on the album, as it just sounds like someone playing a meandering one-finger non-melody on a sizzling and overdriven synth in hopes of making the ugliest possible harmonies. Heroically, however, Dilloway rouses himself for one final (if brief) fanfare of chopped, jabbering voices and annoying buzzes and the album ends on a solid note.

Willfully annoying bits aside, The Gag File is quite a wonderfully disorienting, bleakly amusing, and ambitiously experimental album. In fact, it feels a lot like I am experiencing the final flickering impressions in the mind of a dying vaudeville comedian or birthday party magician in the thrall of acid psychosis. Admittedly, not every song achieves such a transcendent illusion (in fact, only a handful do), but it is remarkable that any do at all. Granted, Dilloway’s former bandmates in Wolf Eyes share a similar passion for celebrating the sickly and the broken, but Dilloway is on much darker, stranger trip all his own. 

In fact, I never get the feeling that Dilloway shares the same concerns as other noise/experimental musicians at all, nor that he is particularly interested in making cool sounds (though they sometimes happen anyway). Rather, Dilloway seems like an artist that has ingeniously found a way to use ravaged tapes and cultural detritus as a means of burrowing deep into his subconconscious to exhume a rotting mound of buried dread and anxiety. Certainly other artists have had similar ambitions over the years, but rarely are the fruits this undiluted by artifice. More significantly, it is even rarer still for that horror to be transformed into the darkest and most perverse of comedies.

Listen here.