DSR Lines - 2015 - Analogie Van De Dageraad

 

Jj funhouse – JJ006

Coming directly after the Assiko Golden Band, this record makes an unexpectedly exact handoff. The drums disappear, but the organizing intelligence of repetition remains. David Edren replaces a neighborhood percussion ensemble with Buchla and Serge modular systems, yet the result never feels like humanity retreating into machinery. Pulses gather, separate, wobble against one another and grow new limbs. Analogie van de Dageraad means “Analogy of the Dawn,” but this is not electronic music pretending to paint a sunrise. It constructs a model of awakening from voltage. Darkness does not abruptly switch off; it is slowly perforated by rhythm, color and movement until the entire field has changed without a single dramatic announcement.

Edren recorded these eight pieces as live improvisations during an intensive stay at ElektronMusikStudion in Stockholm. That word “live” is essential. Although there are no singers, lyrics or conventional instrumental gestures, every sound results from decisions being made in passing time. A modular synthesizer can be programmed into perfect obedience, but Edren had deliberately been moving away from the heavily predetermined computer and MIDI work of his earlier years. He had grown tired of composing events in advance and then merely watching them occur. Improvisation returned physical consequence to electronic music: turn something too far and the patch may collapse; introduce one voltage and several apparently unrelated processes begin behaving differently. Analogie van de Dageraad preserves that alertness. Its structures feel cultivated rather than assembled, more botanical than architectural, though one occasionally encounters a staircase or transmission tower growing among the leaves.

The enormous Buchla 200 and Serge systems at EMS were not simply prestigious vintage equipment borrowed for atmosphere. Their patchable construction encouraged Edren to treat pitch, pulse, duration and tone color as parts of one circulatory system. A sequence can alter a filter, a slowly changing voltage can bend a rhythm, and a signal intended as control information may become audible material. Cause and effect develop side passages. The listener hears sounds behaving less like notes placed along a timeline and more like organisms responding to weather. This also explains the album’s peculiar warmth. Analogue warmth is often discussed as though it were a coating applied by old circuitry, but here it comes from behavior: frequencies rub together, timing loosens and contracts, and repeated figures return with slightly altered weight. The machines do not imitate human expressiveness. They develop their own vulnerable form of it.

“Ontwaakt (startraag)” establishes the album’s slow ignition, giving nearly nine minutes to the act of becoming awake. The brief “Sphinx I” follows as a compact riddle, while “Gamla Png” places what resembles an old digital filename inside all this organic morning imagery, a tiny relic from the computer world lodged among dew, light and electrical vegetation. “Ochtendgloren” brings the first side toward morning glow, but Edren avoids the predictable ambient vocabulary of a horizon gradually becoming brighter and prettier. His dawn has gears, insects and uncertain weather. The second side begins with “Dauwdaling,” moves through the rotational mechanism of “Rotor,” and returns to the Sphinx in a much longer second appearance. The two Sphinx pieces are strikingly unequal, as though the first question has continued developing while the cassette was turned over. “Verstrooiing” finally suggests dispersal, distraction or scattering. Nothing resolves into noon. The energy simply spreads beyond the frame.

This progression gives the cassette a quiet narrative without turning it into program music. The track names provide hints, but the real subject is the way perception reorganizes itself over forty-five minutes. A small pulse that initially sounds incidental may become the center of a passage after another frequency recedes. A drone reveals an internal rhythm. A pattern that seemed fixed begins leaning forward, and what appeared to be background suddenly feels close enough to touch. Edren does not use repetition to hold the listener in one location. He uses it to make tiny changes legible. The music’s apparent patience increases its sensitivity, much as remaining still outdoors eventually reveals movements that were present all along. There are passages of deep suspension, but also blunt beats and bright melodic openings that prevent the record from becoming tasteful ambient wallpaper. At moments its electronic color approaches the joyful strangeness of Franco Battiato’s early synthesizer work, where experiment and pleasure are not required to occupy separate rooms.

The record also joins two important parts of Edren’s life in electronic music. One is the institutional history contained within EMS and its extraordinary instruments. The other is the social, handmade culture of Antwerp spaces such as Scheld’apen, Het Bos and the orbit around Ultra Eczema. He did not approach Stockholm as an academic composer arriving to demonstrate mastery over a famous machine. He arrived as someone formed by bands, artist-run spaces, small labels, posters, cassettes, concerts and years of practical involvement in a local underground. That background keeps the album from becoming a showroom demonstration. Its technical sophistication remains playful. Even the most abstract passages seem to understand that electronic sound can be serious without becoming solemn, and that a complicated patch is worthwhile only when it produces an experience more interesting than the explanation of how it works.

The original Jj Funhouse edition made this philosophy physical. A military-grey C-45 cassette with black printing was placed inside a black library case, accompanied by a two-color risographed sleeve and individually numbered as one of only one hundred copies. It resembles a technical document retrieved from an imaginary municipal archive, perhaps the operating instructions for a dawn that the city stopped using decades ago. The gridded artwork can be read as a patch diagram, a floor plan or an unfinished system of windows, while the handwritten DSR Lines logo curls freely across its straight divisions. That tension between system and gesture is exactly what happens in the music. The grid provides repeatable relationships; the hand refuses to behave identically twice. Later vinyl and cassette editions allowed the album to keep circulating, but the original library-case object remains especially suited to music that feels discovered, catalogued and then quietly returned to the shelf for someone else to activate.

Analogie van de Dageraad ultimately proposes that awakening is not a single event. It is a gradual increase in relationships. One pulse notices another. A low tone changes the meaning of a high one. Rhythm emerges from something previously heard as stillness. David Edren’s achievement is not merely that he made expressive music with historically important synthesizers, but that he allowed the machines’ internal relationships to become the composition. The album never asks the listener to admire equipment. It asks us to hear attention itself taking shape. Anyone who worked with the Buchla or Serge systems at EMS, witnessed Edren’s performances around this period, or remembers the original cassette entering circulation may recognize behaviors and histories that the recording only partially reveals. Those memories would extend the analogy: another faint light arriving, another portion of the structure becoming visible.