Created as part of Sappyfest’s 2020 improvisation installation, Black Dimes’ Post-Capitalist Post-Brain Post-Party EP is the audio equivalent of scrolling through your social media feed, aimlessly hoping to find something meaningful to connect with.
Matt Carter
Let’s get real weird for a minute. And I mean that as a friendly invitation. It’s not a backhanded insult to what I’m trying to share with you. It’s more of an invitation to step outside your comfort zone and listen to something new. Something different. Something weird. Consider this your invitation into the world of Black Dimes.
Black Dimes is a project by Sackville-based musician Evan Matthews. Matthews is an accomplished player and multiinstrumentalist with a skill set and background that crosses genre and purpose with equal ability.
Post-Capitalist Post-Brain Post-Party is the audio equivalent of scrolling through your social media feed, aimlessly hoping to find something meaningful to connect with. Created as part of Capitalist Brain Party No. 3, an audio installation/improvisation project created for Sappyfest 2020 in partnership with the Saint John-based experimental noise outfit, Usse. Artists were invited to reimagine and remix an array of isolated improvisational tracks as their contribution to the project.
“I had been taking the lockdown time to read, having discovered UK post-rave accelerationist figures like Mark Fisher, Sadie Plant, Kodwo Eshun, and Nick Land,” said Matthews. “Fisher in particular was a huge inspiration. While I was making this I was reading his book Ghosts of My Life and the character of the raw material Usse had created fit very nicely with the sonic aesthetic and ideas behind Fisher’s concept of hauntology – music that mourns lost futures as the development of newness in the present has been halted by the inertia of the dictatorship of capital, the future cancelled and replaced by an indefinitely recurring present.”
And if this doesn’t help you better understand this latest release from Black Dimes, the statement that accompanied this release may help make things clearer:
Drone pop for dopamine feedback surfers who dig autonomous images that hit just right out of the subterranean skywriting to take the edge off the world we can’t really touch touching us. Hyperreal fictions layer into habits to create themselves as normal enough for those who labour in the psychic lithium mines, razor-alert yet totally relaxed on the code drugs that hijacked our friends to sell their images back to us daily.
Still at a loss? Tell you what. Step away from your social feeds for nine minutes and give this EP a full listen. For willing participants, all will be revealed.
