Cremation Lily
Dreams Drenched in Static
THE FLENSER
The dark-night-of-the-soul conception of Dreams Drenched in Static is as much an examination of the confused mental state between sleep and consciousness as it is a work literally crafted in the blurry space between late night and early morning. As Cremation Lily, Zen Zsigo confronts the thoughts—or are they dreams?—you find yourself mulling over every time a distant slamming door rouses you from a sleep you hadn’t quite fully fallen into, thoughts which you’d never arrive at in your waking life. And inherent in that not-entirely-un-Dali-esque creative process is a gray area of genre which it seems the listener’s own unconscious mind is tasked with filing in itself.
I was surprised to see the terms “shoegaze” and “black metal” floating around the release’s press materials—two genres Zsigo’s Flenser labelmates frequently dip their toes in, but rarely commit to—while Rate Your Music’s always-heavily-policed genre tags for the album listed it on the morning of release day as “witch house” and “nu metal.” But the more I connected to—and dissociated from— the record, the less I was able to hear any of these diverse strains of influence. If anything it reminded me of the whirlwind fractured beats of Body Meat, Wreck and Reference, or (less industrially) the new Pendant album, which are all inspired as much by hip-hop as they are eccentric electronic music. Meanwhile the vocals dip in and out of fairly conventional screamo and the emo-flecked enunciations of Goth Boi Clique, especially on the particularly emo-song-titled “I Need to Stop Blaming Myself.”
Less surreal than it is abstract-expressionist, Dreams Drenched in Static often feels mutable depending on whatever type of music your brain’s most fixated on at any given moment (which, yeah, if you’ve just heard Cremation Lily ambiently cover Korn on The Flenser’s recent nu metal tribute album, “nu metal” may feel apt here). But the point is its abstract expression: The record feels less born of homage to pre-existing sounds and more the product of how our brains process the emotions these sounds make us feel afterward, once we’ve shut our brains off. Rather than listening, it often feels like you’re swimming through Zsigo’s soundscapes in the exact same way you tread through the truly nonsensical streams of thought that combine data from the Instagram Stories you’ve consumed immediately before bed and the deep-seated anxieties you’ve yet to identify in therapy once you drift off to sleep.
