Air Conditioned Nightmare
“The Air Conditioned Nightmare is the name of the new album by Doldrums.
“The title was spawned by Henry Miller upon his return to the US after ten years as an expatriate. Keen to rediscover the country he left behind, Miller found it a stifling place of big business, pollution, credit, misinformation and prejudice. In short: a spiritual, moral, cultural and aesthetic vacuum. “Nowhere else in the world,” he wrote in his 1945 collection of essays “is the divorce between man and nature so complete”. The Air Conditioned Nightmare.
“Seventy years on and the book lends itself to the title of the anticipated second album by Doldrums, the band lead by 25 year old musician Airick Woodhead. On the follow-up to the 2013 debut Lesser Evil, the DJ, producer and performer makes a sizeable leap from being darling of the same fertile Montreal warehouse creative explosion that gave the world the likes of Grimes, Majical Cloudz, Blue Hawaii to simply being a stand-alone artist and composer on the cusp of something quite special.
“Doldrums craft musical montages, paint sonic pictures from a new palette, construct sounds using leader, Airick Woodhead’s own unique architectural blueprint. He applies punk rock ethos to electronic music, creating songs using samplers and DJ gear in place of guitars. Bold, anxious, dream-like, uplifting, glacial, hypnotic, constricting, expansive, alien – this is an album that is ever-changing. “Conflict is at the heart of this album,” explains Airick. “There’s a lot of paranoid sentiment and dystopian imagery in there. The threat of a mundane reality ties it together, as does an obsession with plasticity. Songs come from specific feelings or images. Anxiety is my default state (read more at Sub Pop).”
Songs To Check Out:
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