TUNES // gravedream – Squares and a Five

Post by Misha

Music as collage. That’s what I kept thinking as I listened to this track for the first time, though I’m not exactly sure what that means. There’s an influx of music being made these days that excels in juxtaposition (100 gecs, Rina Sawayama come to mind). This music takes the essense of something comfortable and recognizable – a melody, a sample, a production flourish – and, through proximity and contrast, makes it garish, unsettling. In Squares and a Five, gravedream plays with this style, but with a grace and subtlety that leaves nothing on the surface.

Square and a Five is a collage where each layer is a hint at meaning. An anxious buzz is buried under a reverent hum, and the hum under a blanket of angry static. There is a tip-of-the-tongue familiarity to each element that barely escapes recognition before being absorbed into the whole, but which nonetheless saturates the whole piece in a liminal disorientation. Splashes of color, jagged and precise, strategically chaotic, decontextualized and pasted together, create a bed of sound from which the song grows outward. 

The lyrics float just at eye level, piercing and clear with purpose. There is a sense of emerging and then sinking back down into a dense swirl. There is a sense of these being just a few of many things waiting to be said.

Buy Squares and a Five on Bandcamp.