Behemoth

Picture this: you're watching an actor in his fifties playing a politician—a tall white man with good hair and a crisp blue suit, greeting his adoring audience after a successful rally. Consider a very special episode Scandal. People cheering, waving signs of support. Our great nation sees its benevolent leader. And then, coming in from the side of the screen comes a terrifying freak dressed in dark clothing. He has a gun! Pop, pop, pop. Screams, commotion. As the camera pans out to capture the bedroom, the music kicks in, just as you'd expect. An orchestral piece scaled down to computer size, its patriotic weirdness. This is the music of a real crisis in a fake nation. Will our country survive? That's the question urgently raised by d'Eon's fantastical score. On “The President Has Been Shot,” the most aptly titled song of all time, the oboes are distressed, the cellos are deeply disturbed, and the violins pump fast enough to match the speed of our racing hearts.

Although Montreal producer Chris d'Eon has always leaned toward a telegenetic brand of miniature chamber music, at first it seemed like that preference was an accent, not the focus itself. In 2011 Darkbloom, a split LP with then-fellow underground Canadian producer Grimes, his mysterious trill was paired with an instrument largely absent from his new music: drums. The use of percussion, largely due to Chicago's various forms of dance music, from house to foot, was the least interesting part of the music, but the most important. Abandoning the drive to focus on distorted melodies has created a new lane, between the avant-garde and the heavenly, the classical and the canned. In the past decade, he has released several volumes of fairly straightforward liturgical music through it Music for keyboards series, albeit in the context of his much fuller new album Behemoththese records are more like a dare to see if he could do it, a mastering of imitation along the way to really find his own dumbest voice.

Much of the music on his new album, like “The President Has Been Shot,” is dramatic but, mostly, self-aware. Yes, you can love a thing and mock it at the same time. This is music that lies somewhere between religious and state music, where purgatory is both theme and experience. Two other pieces, besides “The President”, describe an action: “Climbing the Overhang” and “Installation of the Cisterns”. The former takes a playful approach with noisy 80s digi-funk synths, like climbing a ledge is a feat that might have happened The Jeffersons. The latter, with digital ticks and chimes that give the track a MIDI-gamelan feel, is ritualistic but a little sinister. These cisterns may end up being part of a crazy plot Oceans 14.