Markus Mehr - Dyschronia

A Closer Listen

Dyschronia is an album eerily aligned with its time, as it addresses technology, surveillance, wiretapping and the disconnected plight of the modern era, while exuding an aesthetic appeal.

Today’s industrial societies are approaching total technological immersion.  Our words are recoverable even after they have been wiped from hard drives.  Phone conversations are prone to becoming public record.  Servers are subpoenaed.  Burner phones are used by the guilty and the innocent alike.  The words of Luke 12:3 seem prescient:  “What you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.”  The final track contains a dialogue that begins and ends with the question, why didn’t you burn the tapes?  Older listeners may remember Watergate.  Younger listeners may think of Donald Trump’s warning to James B. Comey, tweeted earlier today:  “You better hope that there are no tapes of our conversations.”  In defense of his decision, a defendant protests, There was never a thought that one word of those tapes would be played in public.  

Dyschronia means “a lack of comprehension of concepts of time.”  By unmooring samples from time and blasting them with electronic waves, Markus Mehr underlines the concept, presenting a world in which all things happen at once, sans guidepost.  He captures not only the sense of digital surfeit, but of digital edit and re-edit.  The world gives us sound, but we prefer sound bytes.  Mehr turns the idea on its head, intercepting fragments of beauty from the ether:  organs and orchestras, engines and choirs.  In “Dyschronia 2”, a hardhat blast stutters like a machine that won’t start or an industrial track that won’t begin, demonstrating the limitations of interrupted signals.  In like fashion, the music samples hint at larger, more intriguing works.  In their revised context, they are slaves rather than partners: tamed, corralled, assigned.  Mehr’s only (intentional) derailment is to make his soundscapes seem so appealing as electronic-organic blends that the listener fails to question what may have been lost in translation.  Perhaps this is the artist’s hidden point: that we have replaced one type of beauty with another, the soulful with the soulless, and have fooled ourselves into thinking that the two are equal.  Our memories, preserved in sample and sound byte, promote a secondary nostalgia, not for time itself, but for the time when we attempted to capture time on cassette, videotape or phone.  To paraphrase, our memories have become polluted by the technological medium of “preserving” our memories.

Mehr makes his point so smoothly that we may receive it blithely.  Such a reaction supports his central argument, that we have been lulled into a blind and dangerous trust.  If the first six tracks are sirens on an island, the seventh is the warning blast.  Given what we now know, and what’s now happened, it was a disastrous thing to have done.  (Richard Allen)

Release date:  16 May

Available here soon

ATTN:Magazine

I couldn’t have picked a better time to write about this record. I’m currently working nightshifts. 7pm until 7am. They don’t come up often, but given the amount of effort I’ve exerted in trying to whip my circadian clock into obedience over the past couple of years (earlier bedtime, no caffeine after midday, no screens at night etc), they’re becoming increasingly difficult to endure. I tend to awake at about 2pm after five hours of intermittent sleep, and then step outside and pretend that I’m a diurnal creature just like everyone else, shuffling through the food hall of Marks & Spencer and squinting at the lights and white surfaces of the freezer aisle. Dyschronia opens on a collage of imagined musical fragments, detuned radios and the bustle of morning commute, and I float from one space to another without even a moment of stillness, each sound slipping off the rim of the stereo image before I have the opportunity to properly engage with it.

There’s also a low, buzzing drone at the centre, which perfectly captures that sleepless headache, that pressure on my temples that gently urges my eyes to close, that harsh artificial light that renders every hallway and room as a sterile, synthetic render of the daytime. This thick electronic hum is the sound of the body in nauseated complaint. I shouldn’t be awake. Of course, this sensation isn’t exclusive to my night shifts. It also rings true to those days when I let my daily routine slip. Instead of allowing the daytime to trail off elegantly through evening ritual, reducing my activity to a book read by warm light before lowering me toward sleep, I hold myself within a state of transient consumption until I pass out. With restless sleep comes an ever-fainter distinction between one day and another, and a gradual blurring at the edges of sensory experience. Dyschronia carries this scenario to its very extreme, disconnecting me entirely from the passing of time.

As well as enacting collage in a manner that feels thoroughly drowsy, swerving into incomplete extracts of conversation and rolling instrumental loops around the frame like kneaded dough under palm, Mehr manages to evoke that tangling of present tense experience and retrospect. Synthesisers trade places with the clatter of public spaces, which in turn melt into a tentative whimper of violins or the crack of ice in a glass, which then sink into electronc chords that slosh from left to right, which then curdle into the falsetto vowels of church choir. Everything is vague and only part-received, which makes it difficult to distinguish between the “just heard” and “hearing now”; I sleepwalk between sounds while daydreaming about the one before and fantasising about the potential sound to come, splaying my sensory engagement all across the axis of time. It’s clearly a beautifully made record, and part of me wishes I could be more awake to vividly appreciate that.