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Chaotic Era

by Strategy

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about

Over the course of more than 20 years, Paul Dickow's project Strategy has been an active laboratory for the Portland-based producer / composer to shatter barriers between genres and shape a bottomless reservoir of tropes and ideas into a morphing catalog that defies any easy categorization. Strategy's work encompasses strident four-on-the-floor techno, wispy ambient sketches, bass-heavy dub excursions, and mind-altering noise texture, to single out just a few of the styles he has tried on over the years on releases for labels including Kranky, Idle Hands, Peak Oil, Zamzam Sounds, and Longform Editions. His choice to present all of this under the umbrella of a single moniker not only highlights the links in the fundamental genetic code between these traditions, but also sets a bar for the experimentation and recombination that one unfettered mind can achieve when it has no use for the clean boundaries that typically guide our collective trip through contemporary music.

On Chaotic Era, Dickow's first release with Dreamtone, the artist zeroes in on a strain of glitched & scorched production that applies subtle decisions of textural disfiguration and effects processing to central synth figures that lurch and churn along their own chopped rhythmic grids. As Dickow builds tracks over foundations that might resemble a corroded sample airing out a melancholy quasi-melody, or backdrops of throbbing bass accented with speckles of static, he patiently tinkers with the timbre and level of intensity of each element in the mix. The result is a branch of ambient music that steps just over the threshold of narcosis into the realm of steady narrative development, complicated with the upheavals of a wall of distortion here, a sudden dollop of abstract electronic putty there - all struck through with microscopic details in tonal shaping and generatively interacting arrhythmic loop architectures.

Chaotic Era arrives in tandem with a surreal short graphic work by Lando. The artist runs a publishing collective called Decadence alongside fellow comic artist Stathis Tsemberlidis, who together have published 11 anthologies of short science-fiction comics featuring their own work, as well as other contributors - including a number of Lando's individual zines. Lando has also been featured in a larger collection of older / out of print work published by UK publisher Breakdown Press. His stories explore themes including ecology, geopolitics and deep time, while experimenting with the format of the printed zine to escape conventional expectations.

Lando's visuals for Chaotic Era lay out an archetypally American suburban environment in which gravity seems to have failed and fungal growths have taken over the cars and other machinery that dot the emptied landscape. Land masses float into their own reconfigured tectonic shapes, while no signs of the populace remain among the forgotten debris of civilization. In the spirit of the Strategy’s music, we watch familiar shapes warp into forms both fresh and corrupted, and we contemplate the grandeur of a space that seems desolate in one sense, yet full of unexpected fragments of the familiar in another.

credits

released October 22, 2021

Written & Produced by Paul Dickow
Artwork & Design by Lando
Liner notes by Max Allison
©2021 Dreamtone

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Strategy Portland, Oregon

STRATEGY is Paul Dickow, a musician, DJ, producer, and co-founder of the Community Library label. Dickow has been based in Portland, Oregon in the Cascadia autonomous region, since 1994 - Strategy recordings began in 1998 and were first released in 2002.

Your meaningful contributions here are deeply appreciated and help pay for studio rent, equipment upgrades, repairs, and recording fees!
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