​​Steve Seel believes that "memory is resistance." In an age when authoritarian political forces seek to erase both our individual and collective memories through propaganda and gaslighting, Seel says it is more important than ever that we preserve our memories of what life was like before our current era -- to maintain an "emotional umbilical cord" to our core selves. And it's in that spirit of remaining connected to our beliefs, integrity, and honesty that his third and latest release as Dismantlists, Evidence, was conceived.

 

In a sleeve depicting a collection of vintage tape recorders that Seel has owned since his youth, Evidence conjures the spirit of a very non-digital world, honoring an old, analog means of documenting sound before all musical art was uploaded and thus relinquished to the realm of our self-appointed tech gatekeepers - and therefore, in danger of being either held ransom to be sold back to us at a price or erased altogether. The music continues in the spirit of Dismantlists' previous releases, Here at the End (2018) and Pilgrims (2020), expressing "the feeling of living in apocalyptic times," as Seel says, but on this third album, defaulting slightly more to warmth and wonder — qualities necessary as a bulwark against dehumanization.

 

This is not to say that technology doesn't play a part in Dismantlists' music; quite the contrary. This may be electric guitar, but it's often not apparent as such; loops can sound like musical fractals or Möbius-strips, twisting around in evocative ways. Pedals are used to stack note sequences that recur at different intervals. The end result is music of a kind of uncanny mystery and ephemerality -- and once again, cinema seems a regular atmospheric reference point for Evidence, just as Dismantlists' previous releases evoked noir-ish images of rainy pavement and dusk.

​

​Seel says he was inspired to write the opening track, "When You Run Away but Can Still See the House," while thinking about composer Gavin Bryars' Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet - a work similarly constructed around a single musical phrase that slowly transforms as it repeats. After completing the recording, however, the title image occurred to him, expressing a loneliness that is nevertheless "always tethered to the possibility of return and reconciliation." "So Long, Tomorrowland," a determined march joined by distant organ suggesting a growing epiphany, began its life as a response to the film The Truman Show (significantly, also about overcoming a relentlessly gaslighting universe), while "Under the River" evokes faint, distant glimmers of light utilizing an early guitar synthesizer overlaid with "embarrassing amounts of delay." And tracks like "A Shifting Band of Rain," "Welcome to Liquor Village," and "She Walks In Green" nod to the long tradition of atmospheric guitar-based ambient rock and post-rock of Fripp & Eno, David Torn, and David Sylvian, while also joining more recent practitioners such as Benoit Pioulard, Stars of the Lid, and Richard Skelton, and echoing minimalist classical composers such as Johann Johannsson and John Luther Adams.

 

Dismantlists discography:

 

Here at the End (2018)

Pilgrims (2020)

Evidence (2026)

​​

​