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Dania Shapes
By Adam Arrigo
Photo by Molly Lorenzo
Words do little justice in describing Dania Shapes’ sound, but that’s kind of the point. Somerville-based artist Daniel Lopatin’s audioscape consistently defies description or classification, existing somewhere in the undefined grey area of post-Eno ambient and offensive noise. His often-disorienting mix of delicate melody buried beneath projections of distorted analog fuzz creates a sense of modal contrast. At his barest essence, however, Lopatin is really just in love with melody. Even as his compositions become increasingly shrouded in high-gained analog growls, and any organic instrumentation becomes disfigured by dissonance, the actual melodies at the bottom of the mix, in contrast, take form as all the more lovely.
Like most modern electronic artists enamored with old analog synths from the ‘80s, Lopatin uses a combination of digital technology along with the analog classics. “All my boards are analog, but all my sculpting is super digital and the cuts are usually really aggressive and glitchy,” says Lopatin. “This gives the analog sounds the appearance of glossiness, plus digital delay; but yeah, generally I love this mixture of long, melismatic layers of ancient board plus insanely detailed cut ‘n‘ paste digitalia.”
2006 saw the release of Soundsystem Pastoral on Berlin-based imprint Naivsuper, home to experimental sound artists Stephane Leonard, Marcel Turkowsky, Sonic Kitchen and Happy Zloty. The record is a perfect example of the fusion between analog textures and digital editing. One of the unique aspects of Dania, though, is his lax editing in respect to grid quantization. Like artists such as Fourtet, Dania Shapes is less invested in sample-based time correction and quantization and more invested in achieving a distinctly loose and organic feel. “The music I love is not heavily programmed music,” says Lopatin. “It’s mostly jazz and early techno and early hip-hop — music that’s pretty buggy and homemade and made by people who don’t have all day. That’s a relationship to music that comes out of limitation and a sort of ecstatic ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude ... I just try to imbue that spirit the best I can and bring it to experimental music, and try to make it loose and free ... Serious music and serious technique often is missing that very humane and joyous arc.”
Holograd, Dania’s forthcoming record, finds the artist more comfortable than ever in the digital realm. The record is denser than its predecessor — more ominous and destructive, with often disjointed digital editing. “October” is a jarring assault on the senses, using discordant feedback loops and jagged stabs of modulation to bombard the listener with layer upon layer of sonic mayhem. Residing quietly beneath an unsubtle surface of distortion is a haunting and mellifluous organ, which pokes its head nearer to the surface as the sounds rot away into what feels like complacent dissonance. The record maintains a surprising amount of cohesion given the unpredictable nature of its content, each song threatening to veer off into oblivions of noise at any second.
2007 will see the album’s release through Providence-based Paper Cities, as well as a split EP with Cleveland dronist Bee Mask called Compact Diss, which promises to be “equal parts easy listening and fracturous noise.” That particular merger seems to describe the whole of Dania Shapes’ aesthetic sprawl. With the release of the daring Holograd, Dania Shapes will surely garner more attention from the underground scene; however, with the unpredictable nature of electronic music’s relationship to the mainstream, car commercials may or may not be in store for Dania. “I know that I’ve ousted myself from the electronic music mainstream because I don’t have trad rhythm going on — which protects me in some sense,” says Lopatin. “But for how long I don’t know. What happened to techno is that it got subsumed by the hegemony and became the soundtrack to buying things. Eno called it with Music For Airports, which was a sort of wonderful reinterpretation of muzak and a new sort of mode of listening. Melodic noise is an equitable target; it’s just a matter of time. Artists like Fennesz will inevitably enter the imaginations of millions of people as soon as VW finds out about it. The nice thing about NOW is, we’re not there yet ... there are plenty experimental audio frontiers that seem incredibly alien and beautiful and outside of post-capitalism ... I think that’s why I live there ... a little repose in the middle of the 10 year slide.”