Damnesia-vu doesn’t want everybody to like his music.
It’s counterintuitive: in a culture where SoundCloud plays is a principal metric for quality, artists feel obligated to appeal to everyone. Too often we assume that “good music” transcends personal preference to enchant each and every ear it falls upon. But basic psychology explains that humans are attracted to familiarity: individual tastes are closer to a reflection of what we’re used to than an objective assessment. Anyway, there’s a name for music that is consistently and uniformly liked: Pop.
For DMVU, making music isn’t about hooking fans. It’s an intimate release. To pander to the preferences of some amorphous imagined audience defeats the purpose of production altogether. He doesn’t care about followers – he cares about feelings. DMVU has a special touch for spinning his guts into sound waves. Instead of a pre-determined template, his songs start with emotion. His music won’t sound “familiar” upon the first listen. Still, to many, his honesty resonates.
Like most fans of underground music, DMVU never held normativity in high regard. He was first inspired by the decidedly anti-commercial vibe of deep dubstep and the soothing power of subfrequencies it contains. He found a home in Denver’s dubstep community of misfits and social deviants. In a scene overflowing with dubstep producers, DMVU’s interpretation of the style stood out. His technical prowess and discerning ear certainly played a role in the success of his 140 endeavors, but there’s an elusive quality that accounts for his music’s true shine. Perhaps it can be explained, simply, by the fact that DMVU didn’t necessarily set out to make good dubstep. Genre conventions and expectations come second to self-expression. Of course – as evidenced by releases on Abyssal Audio and Encrypted – the dubstep community ate it up.
Even within a genre characterized by unique stylistic and structural parameters, unoriginality runs abound. Unapologetic imitation crowds space for creativity. Even the most technically skilled producers can trap themselves chasing the success of somebody else’s sound. So the appeal of DMVU’s dubstep is illustrated best by his lack of commitment to the template. When he doesn’t feel the 140 sound, he makes something else. For artists concerned with building themselves as a brand, this can be a kiss of death. But DMVU’s shift toward hip-hop inspired beats and futuristic, experimental tunes performed a sort of exorcism on his dubstep fan base: at least a handful followed his sound out of their comfort zone, and stayed there.
This is a rare case where the ambiguous “future bass” label is the most appropriate descriptor. DMVU’s recent work fuses his minimalistic, bass-anchored foundations; hip-hop’s trademark swinging rhythm; the contagious energy that fuels electronic trap music; and a subtly optimistic sincerity that is unmistakably his own. Inventive, style-bending remixes of artists like Author prove that music needn’t be obscure or inaccessible to have artistic merit. Songs inspired by photographs and dreams speak to the power of a shared existential experience: translated into sound, the profoundly personal is beautifully relatable. DMVU makes music about what it means to be human.
And, yes, individuality is part of humanity, too. DMVU’s alter-ego, Pocket Rocks, highlights his most experimental endeavors – “weird avant-garde music that [I’m] pretty sure no one will like”. Here his dedication to authentic expression (as well as constant progression as a producer- and person) is especially obvious. So, when once upon a recent road trip, my dad abruptly pulled the plug on a Pocket Rocks mix – I smiled and counted it a success. My dad should hate my music.
To an artist devoted to offending the norm, this is a true sign of approval.
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Amye Koziel