I've been making records for thirty years using a whole variety of approaches and I thought I'd heard most things. Then someone sent me a link and I fell down a rabbit hole I'm still not out of…and maybe don’t want to be.
DatZO Recovery Team describes itself as a cultural recovery archive — an operation that retrieves music from adjacent timelines via simulating latent space. Music that never existed here - in Earth Prime. Their words, not mine. The concept sounds close to performance art, and maybe it is. But the music is real and it kicks all kinds of ass.
Their debut release DEEPWELL is a double album. Two volumes, 36 tracks released simultaneously at the end of June, each with its own character.
DEEPWELL: The Gungha Club (DZO-001) Electo indie disco I guess. ‘Pieces’ is genuinely wonderful and transcedant and ‘Kick This Habit of You’ has a wry London compressed punk vibe. Even if this is an alternate universe - I want to be there or rather go dancing and geting wild at The Gungha! Other immediate tracks to note would be ‘Deeper for a While’ managing to be warm, hypnotic and tragic all at the same time.
DEEPWELL: East River Broadcasts (DZO-002) is much less about dancing in a club and more classic indie-pop albeit twisted in places with electro punk’tuations. Be A Bird opens it with clacking handclaps like birds and impines us to escape control while Fear Is A Tree closes it out and lingers. The rest of the 15 are quite eclectic with the silly No Man Is An Island a real charmer.
I don't know who DatZO Recovery Team actually are. The archive is at datzo.io and the trail goes cold quickly, which is presumably the point. What I do know is that both records are up on Bandcamp now, and that I've played them more than anything else this week.
Make of the mythology what you will but get down either way.