When the Reader‘s music staff launched the Listener almost a year ago, we hoped that you, the great reading public, might come to see it as a weekly way to hear from your imaginary friends who always have a new band or record they’re excited to tell you about. To explain why I’m excited about this week’s record, I have to confess to a long-standing bias against electronic dance music—perhaps an unseemly attitude for a music editor to hold. But I’m also inviting anyone who feels the same way to benefit from my efforts to break myself of that prejudice.
I found Dengue Dengue Dengue with the October 2020 release Fiebre, at which point I listened back through their Bandcamp page. Fiebre turns out to be my favorite of their records, possibly because it’s the strangest and most abstract. Though many of the tones clearly originated with real-live hand drums, bells, shakers, and rattles, elsewhere digital sounds and acoustic sounds blend into each other: That’s obviously a synth patch, not a steel drum, but is that ocarina sampled or simulated? What about that pedal tone in the piano? The music rarely seems to be attempting a specific genre with its freewheeling combinations of unmoored elements—the title of track three, “Menestra,” means “stew.”
