I think that we all have a fondness for the music from a certain period in our lives. For me, the period where I felt most connected to and inspired by contemporary music was in the period of 2003 through to about 2010. Much of the music I felt attached to in that period informs the music I write about today.
Electroclash; the influence of post-punk, DFA, and LCD Soundsystem; Daft Punk’s second era; Cut Copy’s reimagining of Fleetwood Mac on In Ghost Colours; Phoenix’s technicolored Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix; Soulwax’s grungy take on dance music… All of these sounds tickle my pleasure senses when I hear echoes of them today, even as I recognise that they, themselves, were echoes of their own.
There is an artist from that same period, however, that I would classify as having produced the album I love the most that you (yes you) are least likely to have heard of. And that, dear reader, is the chaotically wonderful How About That?, by the relatively unknown Icelandic musician Gisli. The sound employed on that under-appreciated album is undoubtedly heavily indebted to Beck, with a dash of anti-folk, and yet Gisli took his sound in a more overtly accessible direction. His reward for that was, I sense, obscurity.
Still, How About That?, and songs like The Day It All Went Wrong and Mind Games, soundtracked a period of my life… Early days with my (now) wife, hanging with one of my best friends from school, in the early days that followed university, the course of life uncertain.
And so when I heard the gently strummed guitars and overdubbed vocals of DD Walker’s In The Way Or Disappear, I heard the echos of that period of my life. Walker embodies a similar aesthetic – grungy vulnerability meets a loose sense of creative experimentalism. The opening two-minutes plays gently, heartbroken as Walker unpacks a break-up, before a wall of guitars blows away the emotional cobwebs. It’s precisely the sort of thing Gisli would make, and I love it.
Describing the song, DD Walker talks about the urgent pace with which In The Way Or Disappear was written, which is abundantly clear in just how vital it sounds… This is the kind of song that violently comes out of someone, all at once:
“I wrote this in 15 minutes at 2 in the morning after a months-long low after this dramatic break-up. I was crashing in the room I made music in when I was growing up and just put together a little make-shift recording setup for 2 weeks back there. The nostalgia was palpable in that space and with this wish to be back with this person and how we were before it was a negative thing… I demoed a record’s worth of material in a couple (of) weeks, and this was the most direct and quick to finish.”
NYC-based producer DD Walker is currently working on the release of his forthcoming EP, Night At The Arcade. The EP was co-produced and mixed by Andrew Maury, who has previously worked with Post Malone, Shawn Mendes, and Ra Ra Riot. Check out In The Way Or Disappear below.