​​Memory is resistance. In an age when authoritarian forces seek to erase both our individual and collective memories through propaganda and gaslighting, it's more important than ever that we preserve our recollection 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 the third and latest release as Dismantlists, Evidence, was conceived.

 

In a sleeve featuring some vintage tape recorders that I've owned since I was a kid, you might say Evidence honors the spirit of a very non-digital world, signaling an old, analog means of documenting sound before all musical art was uploaded and thus relinquished to the realm of our self-appointed tech overlords - and therefore, in danger of being either held ransom to be sold back to us 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 I've said elsewhere, 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 modern technology doesn't play a part in the music; quite the contrary. This may be electric guitar, but it's often not apparent as such; I enjoy using pedals and recording techniques to evoke "unidentifiable instruments," and whenever I stumble on such sounds, I try to use them. As for structure, I like loops that sound like musical Möbius-strips, twisting around in evocative ways. Pedals are also used to stack note sequences that recur at different intervals. The end result, if I'm lucky, is music of a kind of uncanny mystery and ephemerality.

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the songs​

​I 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 (my motif being much simpler though). After completing the recording, the title image occurred to me, expressing a loneliness that is nevertheless always tethered to the possibility of return. "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" continue my nods to the long tradition of atmospheric guitar-based ambient rock and post-rock of Fripp & Eno, David Sylvian, and Stars of the Lid, and echoing minimalist classical composers such as Johann Johannsson and John Luther Adams.​​​