Another fantastic review of "Still Connecting", by Live Music Scene.
‘Still Connecting’ is the debut solo release from Deej Dhariwhal, a real aural alchemist and one third of shoegaze band Thought Forms. The release is, to say the least, intriguing and is music as an art form in the truest sense by which I mean Dhariwhal’s venture is going to be a real challenge for the casual listener (especially with tracks clocking in at 22 minutes) and ultimately an eye-opener for any disciple of sound. If you have chosen to listen to ‘Still Connecting’, prepare yourself, you will not come out the other end as the same person.
‘Still Connecting’ is a venture to push music technology to its limits. Tracks like ‘New Dawn’ take the simplest idea and blasts them with furious aural vengeance becoming what can be described as a soundtrack for the nuclear holocaust, which it may well be. To say ‘Still Connecting’ is a concept album is not untrue; through the course of the tracks the dynamics transform, opening with the destructive ‘New Dawn’ and shifts into ‘Kaide’, a track that suggests re-emergence, the beginning of something new and beautiful and something to get your mind racing, like flowers on Mars.
‘Carborator’ then bulldozes its way through and interrupts potential nirvana, a one-tracked piece of music stuck in alien perpetual motion, circling and swirling and dominating your attention like a UFO. The fourth track, ‘Empty’ is my favourite track on the album, mostly because it’s the one that makes the most sense. A guitar riff loops throughout, a very sensitive and sombre tune. Above all this, synths flicker in and out and all around like neon butterflies. ‘Empty’ suggests what the entirety of ‘Still Connecting’ suggests, an alien world not unlike our own.
Finally, ‘Dunking’, featuring guitar work that would make post-rock impressionists Explosions In The Sky and Mogwai proud. It’s the track that’s the least daring musically, but also the most lethargic clocking in at 11:34, most of the time being taken up by one solid track with no real development. The track however still manages to trigger as much thought as its predecessors and is a real cliff-hanger finish to the musical odyssey that is ‘Still Connecting’ by Deej Dhariwhal.
‘Still Connecting’ is a piece of art that tells a story which falls into the sci-fi genre. It’s music to be respected, but in no way commercialised. The most impressive feature of the album is the production. As mentioned before, ‘Still Connecting’ is a conglomeration of 100 years of development in music technology with features that bands worldwide have been taking advantage of in the past decade. Musically, it is sombre and psychedelic which would put it into the shoegaze genre, but the madness of tracks like ‘New Dawn’ and ‘Carborator’ push it far away from any genre and blasts the album out into space.
