#Divide & Dissolve

[floydleart]

Here's a Lalna, there's a Lalna...

[chelseawolfeonly]

www.chelseawolfe.com/shows

[watermonkeystuff]

Divide And Dissolve live.

[omegaremix]

Omega Radio for January 2X, 2021; #250.

Baroness: “Throw Me An Anchor”

Breacher: “They Call This Life”

Threadbare: “Relocation Policy”

Prayer Group: “Acid Mountain”

Keelhaul: “Some Day Some Other Place”

Remote Viewing: “Fuck A Church”

Mrs. Piss: “Downers Surrounded By Uppers”

King Woman: “Utopia”

Divide & Dissolve: “We Are Really Worried About You”

Mattachine: “Sisyphus”

Castaway: “My Loneliest Dream”

Dreadnought: “Besieged”

Shifting: “Pig From Heaven”

Primitive Weapons: “Keep The Lights On”

Sepultura: “War”

Russian Circles: “Kohokia”

Gojira: “Stranded”

Pig Destroyer: “Circle River”

Less Art: “Diana The Huntress”

Hesitation Wounds: “Charlatan Fuck” + “Hellevangelist”

Horsewhip: “Lowlands”

Junkowl: “Quarantine Us All”

Sumac: “The Iron Chair”

The Body & Full Of Hell: “The King Laid Bare”

The Body: “Our Souls Were Clean”

Uniform: “Life In Remission”

Broadcast #250.

[dustedmagazine]

Divide and Dissolve — Systemic (Invada)

Photo by Su Cassiano

Divide and Dissolve continues to provoke, even if some of the questions are becoming a bit familiar: Can instrumental music express a politics? Is there anything intrinsically subversive in the fact of women of color making heavy music? Is doom metal the right (sub)cultural space for indigenous-identified women wishing to promulgate a socially conscious, anti-colonial agenda? Systemic doesn’t provide any evidence or assertions that will settle those issues, even as the band’s public-facing discourse and promotional chatter strike ever more righteous rhetorical stances. This reviewer is down for the politics. The music is a more complicated proposition.

Doom metal is conventionally possessed of feeling tones that seem suited to Divide and Dissolve’s project: misery on tectonic scales, anger that smolders and simmers and then erupts into sudden conflagration. Other bands have coupled that tonal range with left-leaning socio-political messaging; for recent examples, see Forlesen’s ecologically minded folky doom, or Mordom’s application of glacially paced bum-out music to the problematics of dope addiction. Even more relevant are many of the records released by the Body over the last fifteen years — see especially No One Deserves Happiness (2016) or many of the cover songs compiled on Anthology (2011). Somehow the political content of the Body’s music is both more and less didactic than what Divide and Dissolve has succeeded in articulating, and certainly it’s a lot more compelling, aesthetically and ideologically. 

That’s not so damning a criticism, given the Body’s excellence, which is tough for any band to compete with. But it’s worth noting. Divide and Dissolve gets most didactic on Systemic with “Kingdom of Fear,” which includes a spoken word performance from poet Minori Sanchez-Fung. Over the band’s cool drone and occasional stirs of noise that evoke Earth’s more recent work, Sanchez-Fung intones, “In the kingdom of fear, a shadow hovers over my cover of leaves and violets,” and later, “I have pleaded to consult the chorus of night, to hold the strands of moon that tether me to beauty and let me rest.” The language isn’t straightforward enough to stir politicized passions, and while the images sustain a reading that underscores women’s productive powers, they collapse into an earth-mother symbolics that feels dated and a little soft, when a more militant response seems necessary to confront the injustices attending our current conjuncture. 

The record is better when the music does the talking, as it usually does for Divide and Dissolve. “Indignation” commences with a couple minutes of woodwinds, interlaced and gesturing toward symphonic textures, performed by Takiaya Reed. The inevitable, deafening entrance of Reed’s guitar sounds simultaneously like explosion and collapse, which is not easily done, and which is a fitting sonic complement to indignation: the emotion moves toward the world with aggressive rage, and also back into the person feeling indignant, who insists on the overriding validity of her feeling, her ideas, her sense of fairness. That’s the sort of interest that Divide and Dissolve is capable of generating. 

Of course, none of that relative complexity controls what a listener might tend to feel indignant about. Tune into the various permanently outraged talking heads on The Daily Wire, for instance, and you’ll hear a whole lot of indignation: Matt Walsh’s moronic (and always creepy) reactionary chatter about the status of the noun “woman,” or Candace Owens’ latest bit of semi-coherent clickbait (this reviewer was particularly grossed out by her defense of the cause of the American Confederacy on putative social class terms). Perhaps doom metal would not be the first choice to soundtrack those bits of rightwing bilge — but I can hear Moonsorrow’s insipid, Viking-obsessed, musical muscle-flexing whenever Walsh or Josh Hawley start yip-yapping about masculinity. 

But that’s me. Music’s nonrepresentational access to feeling may be its most distinct and its most powerful aesthetic property. In that aforementioned promotional chatter, much is made of Divide and Dissolve’s investment in the unifying power of non-verbal communication, and the undervalued extent of that non-verbal communication’s presence in our lives and experiences. But the non-verbal is still socially constructed and patently representational. See the recent transformation of the thumb-to-forefinger “OK” sign into an emblem for white power, which occurred through the functionality of social media-driven symbolics. Divide and Dissolve make heavy music, and these are indeed heavy times. To intervene effectively, the heaviness may need the iterative and representational power of the verbal. And when it’s invoked, that language may need to be political, focused and forceful. 

Jonathan Shaw

[nbernardo]

Divide and Dissolve @ Amplifest, Porto - 24.09.2023 © Nuno Bernardo

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

Nevermore - We Disintegrate

[linksvorne]

104. DIVIDE AND DISSOLVE. 2022-11-28 @ Venster99 (w/ Age Of Strange Cults)

[stylized-corpse]

Tonight! So excited to see Chelsea Wolfe for the first time!

[maquina-semiotica]

Divide And Dissolve, "Far From Ideal - Chelsea Wolfe Remix" #NowPlaying

[omegaradiowusb]

OCTOBER 21, 2023 (#361)

Population II: "Beau Bapteme" (***NEW) Borzoi: "Bonus Army" (***NEW) Split System: "On The Street" (***NEW) Honey Radar: "Rainbird / English Costume" Corker: "Sour Candy" (***NEW) JJ & The A's: "Head In A Vat" (***NEW) D. Sablu: "Live" For Tour King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard: "Gila Monster" (***NEW) FACS: "Slogan" (***NEW) Glaas: "Cruel Heart, Cold Summer" (***NEW) Heavy Lungs: "All Gas No Breaks" (***NEW) Porcelain: "C.O.A." (***NEW) Neckbolt: "Sort Of" (***NEW) Motorbike: "Throttle" (***NEW) Blessed: "Felt" (***NEW) Jus B: "No Gaze Inside Out" (***NEW) Divide & Dissolve: "Indignation" (***NEW) Death Index: "Patto Con Dio" Facet: "Automatic" (***NEW) S.M.I.L.E.: Lobotomy" Kal Marks: "Fuck That Guy" KEN Mode: "These Wires" (***NEW) Ditz: "Riverstone" (***NEW) Vangas: "Still" (***NEW) Mt. Phylzzz: "I Took A Selfie At The Protest So Now I'm A Good Person"

Here's some fined-tuned craziness for another deluxe Saturday night. This edition of Omega Radio showcases two hours of new, current, and favorite garage, noise rock, psych-, thunderous and smashed sounds - all in demolition derby form.

It's not over yet. Two more deluxe broadcasts to go before we wrap up Year 11 on the air. Where the wheel stops? Tune in in two weeks and find out.

November 4, 2023 (10PM New York City): final deluxe Autumn Omega + Year 11 broadcast.

[urostakako]

its so odd thinking back to my life a few years ago compared to now

[tardis--dreams]

What kind of misophonic bitch doesn't take her earplugs with her when she's traveling. There's fucking Noises

[omegaremix]

Omega Radio for March 14, 2020; #222.

Harvey Pekar “Tittering Smoke”

Prayer Group “Code Black”

Sunstroke “Revival”

Great Falls “Kettle Logic”

Agenda “Life Left Behind”

Cancer Bats “Inside Out”

Help “The Devil Is A Snake”

Verdun “L’Enfant Nouveau”

American Nightmare “Life Support”

Buildings “Sit With It”

Horsewhip “Fires”

Exhalants “False (St)art”

Remote Viewing “Whitney Houston, We Have A Problem”

Divide And Dissolve “Prove it”

Human Impact “November’

Big Business “Heal The Weak”

Keelhaul “39F”

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs “Reducer”

Anywhere But Home “We Should’ve Stayed Strangers”

Drug Church “Blissed Out”

Less Art “Mood 7 Mind Destroyer: Guilt”

The Body “Myth Arc”

Pinko ‘Spit On The House”

Faking “Less & Less”

(J.J. Paradise) Players Club “The E.M.P.”

The Hope Conspiracy “They Know Not”

Caspain “Vision Blues”

All twos. Noise rock, doom, sludge, stoner, and metalcore volume.