Meditative Punk by Dead Gum

In this new, triple full-length album, Dead Gum offers a 2-hr inner drift that explores the meditative boundaries of low fidelity bedroom psych using severe melancholy, non-managed anger bursts, screeched speaker sounds, otherworldly reverb strums, suffering strings and moaning single coils, all through a non-academic, punk aesthetic. A compass as an internal organ, the gut shows the right direction to move, to seek a different pathway. Perhaps by far Dead Gum’s most ambitious project to date, this is a take on an almost exclusively electric guitar oriented album (even though not a single chord can be heard in almost two hours) with its dreads, noises and drones interfering with manipulated vocals, occasional synths and junk electronics.

Meant to be listened in whole, “Meditative Punk” is divided into three distinctive parts. “Detach From Custom” is a different approach study so as to un-learn specific voicing that bears previously familiar sounds and sound captures, all blended to lead to confusion and confrontation with artistic authority. The second part, “Roaming The Dust Dunes”, is like waltzing on thin ice. Part psychedelic horror soundtrack and part non-music embracement, this segment explores the motion of standing still. Amplified wind howls and the face-whipping in the heart of a muted sand storm. The epilogue, “The Burning Poles”, is a desperate bunch of growls, screams that yearned to change an already dead universe, now merged in vain to sound nothing more than an outshout to vanity and overestimation.

Panagiotis Spoulos (Wham Jah, Reverse Mouth, also labelhead of Phase! in Greece), as Dead Gum, mainly uses guitar and voice through minimal effects to create instant songs, psychedelic collages and direct, stripped-down bursts. The music itself –partially improvised but fully psychographic– has anthropocentric characteristics and lo-fi character and flirts with punk, bedroom pop and analog noise.