No stranger to a juxtaposition, Bangladeshi composer Teerath Majumder has previous in merging seemingly disparate forms to create something new. His 2023 EP Mouno Shonchar blended traditional Bangla sounds with more contemporary compositions, whilst a collaboration with Dhaka-based, electro-acoustic outfit Taraga resulted in spiky metal riffs butting heads with ambient soundscapes. And last year’s Do Not Feed The Robots participatory concert featured musical improvisations responding to toys and robots as a way of criticising the disenfranchising approach of “so-called Artificial Intelligence (AI)”.
On Dust to Dust, however, he’s upped the ante.
Within the space of a single track, he takes us through a multitude of distinct and opposing sound worlds. ‘Mist’, for example, combines vaporous descending tones that slide along at a snail’s pace whilst, in the background, a cross-country train rattles along faster and faster having gulped down a thousand cubic centimetres of helium.
There’s a little of Amon Tobin in the carefully stitched delivery of second track ‘Flare’, but it’s rough enough around the edges to lace the technical mastery with flashes of humanity. A heavily synthesised guitar solo rips out over dubstep beats before exploding into a rumble tumble of interlacing rhythms, chopping and changing its flow more often than a slalom skier. As if Squarepusher is soundtracking a cartoon cat and mouse chase.
‘Oasis’s ambling cloud of gaseous chords offers a little reprieve as it eases from one languorous state to the next. Similarly, ‘Bloom’ calls to mind Aphex Twin’s SAW with its squelches and bloops evolving into a tricksy, serpentine melody which twists around like a playful eel trying to throw off a tail.
Transformation lies at the heart of Dust To Dust. The sounds never settle. They’re always shifting, changing, evolving. It’s in a state of flux, of uncertainty. We’re rarely allowed a moment to rest. And, on the odd occasions where space and familiarity are welcomed, we’re so unsettled by the previous patterns that it’s hard to trust that we won’t be catapulted out into a chaotic new state with a violent jolt.
This is epitomised on opener ‘Ashes’, where accelerating scrunched sounds, falling somewhere between dragged shrubs and stuffed plastic bags, merge with increasingly weighty rainfall. This is swiftly followed by the crack of thunder and a dinged cymbal, setting off jagged, staccato electronic stabs in an erratic rhythm that writhes and falters like a mispatched signal struggling to let corrupted data through. Ascending chords lend the track a sense of magnitude and then we’re unceremoniously dumped in a busy street scene, with tabla drumming and traditional Bengali music piped in amongst the squawk of car horns, excited chatter, and further scrunching.
And whilst that’s a wild rollercoaster of unexpectedness, it’s the penultimate track ‘Dust’ where Majumder is at his most surprising. Here he weaves jazzy piano parts with a distorted voice reciting the second stanza of ‘Ariel’s Song’ from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, giving the lines “Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange” a fresh new context. From ashes to dust, and back once again, constantly changing along the way.
