Credit: Press
Listening to the opening minutes of Divide and Dissolveâs third full-length album âGas Litâ is like entering a concert hall where the orchestra has gone home, but the spectral sounds of their instruments being tuned still lingers around an empty chamber. Strange noises feel like they could have existed for centuries, waiting for a pair of ears to stumble upon them.
Melbourne-based two-piece Divide and Dissolve â comprising of Takiaya Reed (saxophone, guitar, live effects) and Sylvie Nehill (drums, live effects) â have composed a remarkable listen across eight hair-raising, earth-splintering tracks of heavy doom, drone metal and desolate jazz, produced with Unknown Mortal Orchestraâs Ruban Nielson. Whilst honouring their respective Cherokee and MÄori ancestries, âGas Litâ pines for a social utopia where white supremacy and colonisation in all of its guises has been fully dismantled.
OUTBURN ONLINE
January 28, 2021
PHOTOGRAPS BY BILLY EYERS
Divide and Dissolve members Takiaya Reed (saxophone, guitar, live effects/ (Black & Tsalagi [Cherokee]) and Sylvie Nehill (drums, live effects/ (Māori) create instrumental music that is both heavy and beautiful, classically influenced yet thrillingly contemporary, and powerfully expressive and communicative. It has the ability to speak without words, and utilizes frequencies to interact with the naturally occurring resonance. In anticipation of the multidimensional duo’s new album,
Gas Lit, available on Invada Records, the band goes into detail behind the meaning of each track.
TRACK BY TRACK ACCORDING TO THE BAND
“Oblique”
It is a privilege to work through trauma and feel supported in this work. “Oblique” is an acknowledgement that everyone experiences trauma. Everyone has different experiences with the narrative of trauma and their ancestors’ trauma. The end of the colonial project and white supremac
Gas Lit
Allan Gardner
, January 25th, 2021 09:10
The new Divide and Dissolve album may be pitched at fans of James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison, but – whisper it – it is also
a really good sludge record, finds Noel Gardner
The particularities of how music, especially music without a large commercial platform, is listened to at present will undoubtedly ensure that some people will check out the new Divide And Dissolve album without knowing anything much about the band. They’ll find a powerful, impressively unconventional, predominantly instrumental suite, linking sludge and doom metal with a desolate reading of jazz. Should a listener find themselves content with that – let the music do the talking – that is of course their right, but it runs counter to how this Melbourne duo operate, and what confers much of their importance.