This May, Dan Langa’s Fugue State will release its debut full-length After Nothing Comes via Switch Hit Records, what the album notes describe as a “spectral audible weather system” which relies as much on space and erasure as it does presence and melody. “The new [collaboration] refuses the typical distinction between solo project and traditional ensemble,” we wrote in an earlier preview, “an outfit which treats collaboration as its own form of compositional methodology, Langa practising what the press release describes as ‘an obsessive cultivation of studio recordings with a rotating cast of musicians, transformed into spectral, unrecognizable forms.” First single ‘We Are Lasting’ welcomed Maia Friedman of Dirty Projectors on vocals and Erika Dohi on piano, and utilised the full breadth of Langa’s experience across a range of artistic media in its daring, improvisational style.
But that is only the beginning of the process. For once the ‘human’ element is complete, Langa and co. take the recordings and pass them through a myriad of digital manipulations, sampling, distorting and re-harmonsing the sounds into strange echoes of themselves. “The sounds arrive somewhere else, neither at the ‘truth’ of its performance nor at the full dissolution of its human hand,” as the album notes continue. “The ship of Theseus sailing the .WAVs—how many plugins can you apply to a human performance before it’s no longer human? Are Derrida’s ghosts sitting in a room different from the room you are sitting in now?”
Latest single ‘Dark’ offers another glimpse at this singular style. A shape-shifting track which shimmers with a beguiling cyclical, or rather spiral, rhythm, constantly circling itself while still moving towards new ground. “For ‘Dark’, we really leaned into the idea of ‘hypnotized’ that shows up in the lyrics,” Langa explains. “There is an obsessive repetition of synth stabs, processed saxophones, and of lyrics. The same words are repeated over and over again, and as you hear them more, their tone shifts from seductive to aggressive and everything in-between […] The track swells to a breaking point, and the closing moments suddenly suspend in the air with bending melodies.”