New Music: Fugue State – Dark

Fugue State has got some heavy-hitting musicians on board to assist with the deliberately mesmerising textures of Dark.

While the piece feels conceived as a piece of electronica, it pushes the notion of what a song is, and at times, what music is. With vocals that are like snippets of a conversation, using words as tones as well as meaning, Dark leans strongly into repetition, the soothing mantra within the vocals brushing against the less structured loops of the arrangement’s layers of loops, assisted by Ethan Woods, and Maia Friedman (Coco, Dirty Projectors).

There is something pre-formation about Dark, like you are privy to a work in its primal stages, waiting for the listener to apply their meaning to it, all of which leaves me curious as to what Fugue State’s new album, After Nothing Comes, will present us with.

“For Dark, we really leaned into the idea of ‘hypnotized’ that shows up in the lyrics,” says Dan Langa, the composer and producer that leads the collaborative Fugue State project. “There is an obsessive repetition of synth stabs, processed saxophones, and of lyrics. The same words are repeated over and over again, and as you hear them more, their tone shifts from seductive to aggressive and everything in-between.”

“In the studio, we worked with Ethan Woods and Maia Friedman to explore melodies and deliveries with these lyrics to heighten this feeling. The track swells to a breaking point, and the closing moments suddenly suspend in the air with bending melodies.”

After Nothing Comes is out on the 22nd of May. The album is up for pre-order on Bandcamp, where you can also find a fascinating insight into the background and collaborative nature of the album.

Header photo by A L E X S. K. B R O W N