Vivid Recall by Golden Donna

Golden Donna has released six albums to date, and his latest, Vivid Recall, follows in a trend of offering hi-energy music riven with emotion and fury, a variety of ideas and sounds drawn together by a singular passion. It arrives on Portland’s Disposable Commodities, and jumps from noise to techno and lands somewhere in between.

A sonic wasteland, noisy scrub. That’s how Vivid Recall opens. The roar of machinery and the shock of thunder are all around. Where are we and how did we get here?

There’s no time to answer that as moments later we are plunged into a sea of bracing beats.

Mask, a collaboration with Alex Ian Smith, blends a searing and unnerving synth melody with rattling percussion and a mood thick with uncertainty.

Tracks like The Joke are bursting with fizz and crackle, minimalistic without being minimal. Elements of cold wave and electro combine in a brisk and frenetic drone-flavoured percussive meltdown.

Findings leans into classic drum machine sounds, with nine minutes percussive splutterings over yawning chasms.

The mood shifts with the relatively straightforward emotion of Hurts So Bad, a pulsating club track sure to reduce hardened dancers to tears with its melancholy melodies. Are those synths or are they vocals? The otherworldly and indecipherable tones leave these questions unanswered as we float on to the most mournful of late-night experiences.

The album’s centrepiece, if it can be termed that, comes in the one-two punch of Submission and Limit, two tracks that span 25 minutes. Submission has a strange dreamlike quality, with minutes of static crumbling before opening up to lilting ambient tones and faint theremin-esque warbles. These tones drift for what seems an eternity, albeit a welcome eternity. Limit, meanwhile, is a strange and confusing moment, with its crisp percussive snaps sitting underneath synths that whistle with frisson and a vocal sample that seems to claw at your inner organs.

The brilliantly titled Unclear Winter seems to speak to a moment that is unfolding around us while lasting forever, its unrelenting tempo at odds with the languid nature of its musical impulses. It’s imbued with a feeling of travel through mist and fog, thoughts and ideas forever just out of reach.

The album then draws to a close with the utterly unclassifiable Red Light. A riotous melange of sounds and styles that defies notions of cohesion or unity.

Future past. Past imperfect.

US based techno / electronic record label. Limited edition physical artifacts.

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