Album art is a funny thing. As often as the warning is given not to judge a [record] by its cover, sometimes the visual aesthetic of the record perfectly matches the sound contained therein.

Take for example Dreams Drenched in Static, the new album from Cremation Lily, the solo project of Zen Zsigo. Soft images of waves, grasses, and sand dunes are torn apart and combined to form a jagged abstract collage. It’s a stunning visual representation of the sounds on the album: gentle elements like ambient guitars, floating keyboards, clean vocals, and laid back drum machines are chopped and manipulated and pasted together to create something that is harshly overexposed and monstrous. But at the same time, beneath the hiss of white noise and squeals of feedback is a sort of zen-like peace, like the warm embrace of the snow after an avalanche.

(And if it sounds like I’m just parroting the promo email from The Flenser, that’s because they quoted me in it).

At first impression, the harsh noise coating the soundscape can seem abrasive and overwhelming. The tape (literal tape, certain tracks recorded on a homemade recorder) is oversaturated and grainy, with bursts of static interrupting the space between notes. Zsigo’s voice is frequently warped and buried beneath subsonic pulses and circuit-bent keyboards. Occasionally he explodes with black metal shrieks, distorted to the point that they meld with the cacophony of the production.

But hiding beneath the acerbic and unintelligible noise is one of the more delicate and gorgeous records I’ve heard in a long time. And at a point, your ears adjust to the harshness, and the overexposed sonics stop becoming abrasive and become oddly comforting, not unlike the drowsiness that comes from freezing to death or the feeling of weightlessness that would accompany drowning (it’s worth mentioning that Zsigo nearly drowned a few years ago and credits the experience with influencing the direction of the project).

With more conventional production, these could almost be slick Frank Ocean-esque pop tracks: “Selfless” is probably the most transparent for that aim, but the same trick is employed on the trap-via-industrial “Wavering Blood,” the dreamy (or nightmarish) “I’m Done (Indefinite Light),” and the almost anthemic “I Need to Stop Blaming Myself.” Some of the tracks could land somewhere near chillwave acts like Neon Indian or Washed Out—especially the keyboard-driven “Body on a Lake,” until it explodes with a machine gun pulse of an overdriven drum machine.

In trying to describe it to people, I’ve alternated between describing it as if Holy Fawn was a bedroom project and if Bon Iver made a black metal record. Neither description* is a very complete picture of what Zsigo is doing—especially on the staggering title track, which is the first proper song on the record. It seems designed to shatter your perception with a maximalist barrage of sound. But once the line between “ugly” and “pretty” sounds is demolished, the record opens up to one of the most transcendent listening experiences I’ve had in years.

It’s certainly a challenging record: it might even be physically painful at times. But anyone who takes on that challenge is rewarded in spades. I have become obsessed with this record in a way that rarely happens with me: I’ve already on the fourth spin of the vinyl copy, which doesn’t count how many times I listened to the advance while writing the review.

 

*I asked my wife how it sounded to her, as I have zero metric for how normal people perceive music anymore, and she said “it sounds like chill music but in like, a Matrix-type world.”