Album excerpts:

"World Eater"

"Dominatron"

"Dreamcatcher"

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Black Meteoric Star : Black Meteoric Star
released on DFA
reviewed by Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Gavin Russom has always been out there. Ever since his earliest collaborations, which ranged from tape-loop jam sessions with his cousin, Kelley Polar to blissed out, silly singles with Delia Gonzalez and James Murphy as Black Leotard Front, Russom has been stretching and craning, trying to get his head into the ether while keeping both feet on the ground.

This has twisted Russom into some pretty strange poses over the years, but his latest project, the gritty, hypnotizing Black Meteoric Star, is also one of his most compelling. Over three years in the making and originally conceived of as three 12" singles, Black Meteoric Star is tough, tunneling dance music that works like a psychedelic, a drug meant to twist and transport your consciousness.

The album's opening track, "Death Tunnel", is Black Meteoric Star's most melodic, and it's also the weakest. Anchored to a fizzy, junky approximation of the Knight Rider theme, "Death Tunnel" sounds constrained by the melody, and it probably was; Russom recorded all of these tracks in single takes, each a kind of meditation unto itself, and his music is at its strongest when exploring and capitalizing on simple repetitions. "Death Tunnel"'s follow-up, "World Eater", features only one melodic portion, a damaged, yowling passage that sounds like the most fucked-up space disco, and more than anything, it seems a stunned response to its surroundings: grunting, distorted bass, scraped, fried drones, and cracked out arpeggios. These things are Black Meteoric Star's bread and butter, immersive and abrasive all at once.

The second block of tracks, "Dominatron" and "Anthem", is even more relentless, tightly controlled acid house rabbit holes greased with rusty hi-hats. Russom's improvisations and programming have the effect of a dolly zoom, focused, stationary and in motion all at the same time. This is an effect regularly achieved by many other dance music producers, but Russom's determination to push things into the red, blowing out the bass's upper registers on "Anthem" and filtering the hand-claps in an unnatural way on "Dominatron", gives Black Meteoric Star an unsettling rawness, the same kind of punk energy that crackled through everything from Afrika Bambaataa to the Death Comet Crew back in the late 70's and early 80's.

A third block of similar intensity would be too much for most listeners, which may help to explain why the Black Meteoric Star's final third, "Dreamcatcher" and "Dawn", is so much more mellow. Clocking in at an astonishing 33 minutes, these two tracks are the album's comedown, a hazy return to normalcy in which smudged passages give way to euphoric, exhausted harmonies ("Dreamcatcher") and finally, ominously, the faint burn of white noise (the very end of "Dawn"). Black Meteoric Star is not for everybody, but anybody interested in the psychedelic, meditative aspects of dance music will find it nothing short of revelatory.

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