Daniel Avery
At what point does a record end and an altered state of mind begin? Where does all that caustic noise and ecstatic melody that’s been pressed in a record’s grooves begin to cognitively shift your perceptions and help lift you out of the mundane into a space to inhabit, an escape from the world outside?
Following all that sound will bring you to Tremor – the breathtaking sixth album by Daniel Avery. An inner world built from chaotic noise, transcendental ambience and voices that echo around it like pulsing transmissions from some distant ether world. All those sounds on Tremor sublimely flow and blur together to leave the listener disconnected from the here and now. It’s as close to magic as music can get.
“I’ve never had a more inspiring time making a record” says Avery. “This is a living and breathing collective. Since the earliest recordings, Tremor felt like a studio in the sky, a space in time through we could all pass. Every person on the record leaves their unique mark but the power lies in us all working together. It’s a beautiful lesson acid house has taught me: no one’s energy is more important than anyone else’s… especially my own.”
Tremor opens the door to The Kills’ Alison Mosshart (“Her voice signifies an exciting time in my life when I first started heading out into the night as a teenager… she’s cool as fuck and completely genuine”), Walter Schreifels from Quicksand / Rival Schools (“Those bands were a massive part of my youth, he brings such a clarity with his voice”) as well as a slew of contemporaries in bdrmm, Julie Dawson from NewDad, yeule, Ellie, Art School Girlfriend, yuné pinku, and Cecile Believe.
All of the energy poured into Tremor by Avery and the collective he built has created a free- flowing album that effortlessly draws multiple different styles of music into one shimmering whole. Rhythm tracks shudder and quake like techno records or jungle breaks transmitted from the bottom of the ocean – each a huge sonorous, slowed down depth charge blasting out of the planet’s inner core. An acid drone on Haze flows in on a thunderous sub-bass line that carries the kind of power that could reshape landscapes around it, while the ethereal ambience shared by album opener Neon Pulse and A Memory Wrapped In Paper And Smoke floats on with the elegance of summer rain falling onto still glass.
Elsewhere, the album’s title track blurs a series of scratched records with a guitar line that sounds like it’s just split the heavens apart in a series of notes that perfectly connects this world and the stars above us and a slow motion 4/4 kick drum drives forward a track that feels like a euphoric anthem for the end of the world (I Feel You). The first release from the album – Rapture In Blue – flows in on a slow-motion breakbeat that helps lift LA-based singer Cecile Believe’s beguiling voice to a truly celestial plane. Heard together, the music is completely transportational.
“With previous releases, I’ve talked about the cleansing power of pure distortion, the broken beauty of noise and the enchantment of melodies hidden under multiple waves of sound. Now it feels like those ideas are being transmitted in Technicolor. My life has changed dramatically in the twelve years since Drone Logic was released. We’ve all lost people to the universe and we’ve learnt so much – good and bad. Life has changed in every way. All of that experience is in this record, it has totally shaped it. It’s a hugely expansive version of what I’ve done before. This is a record for the post-rave comedown kids, the guitar heads and anyone else who wants to come along for the ride. Everyone is welcome.”
Tremor arrives at a point where Avery’s workload must appear colossal to the outsider. A producer who DJs, a musician who remixes and an artist continually collaborating, he has recently reconstructed The Cure’s DRONE:NODRONE to universal love and his work as one third of Demise of Love (a group formed with Ghost Culture and Working Men’s Club) currently soundtracks the hazy, opaque edges of dancefloors around the world. The album itself is Avery’s first release for Domino – arguably the world’s most brilliantly free-thinking independent record label.
“If I was to write a list of people who have shaped my life, Erol [Alkan] would be at the very top. I am so grateful for my time with his label Phantasy and all the work we’ve done together over the years. When Domino came along, it was a natural step. I remember playing tracks to them and saying, ‘Imagine if we could get Alan Moulder to mix this.’ And we got him. He has mixed some of my favourite records of all time – Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, A Perfect Circle. He’s someone who creates an incredible warmth in music when it’s at its heaviest. David Wrench – another magician – mixed the other half of the record, bringing such a delicate, pure and intricate touch. Alongside [mastering engineer] Heba Kadry, they are pillars of the Tremor collective.”
And at the heart of that collective, moving between each of those people is the architect of it all, the man who built the dimly lit, eternally-inviting space that comes alive each time the record played. “The record is me trying to find or create a place of inner peace… some people might say that’s a search for a higher power, others say it’s the feeling of getting lost in the pulse of the strobe light… it’s all the same thing. That’s what I’ve been searching for these last few years and it’s the space that Tremor is broadcasting from.”
Tune in, turn it up, embrace the tremors and prepare to leave this place behind.