Review: DODE – Music for critters

There are different modes of self. There's the self who prepares the piano, wedging objects between strings. There’s the player, who acquaints themselves with this disrupted instrument and navigates accordingly, empathetically – incorporating to the metallic chime of certain notes into melodies reminiscent of bell-tower emanations, or turning the dulled thunk of a lower key into a tool of percussive emphasis. It’s unclear as to whether the audio manipulations – reversed or pitch-skewed notes, huge splays of reverb – are applied live or in post-production, but in any case there’s also the self that edits the performance, that consolidates the other two selves into a single documented circumstance. Music for critters is a dialogue and blurring of these versions of self, specifically the selves of Carmen Morales (aka DODE): the player navigates the obstacles of the preparer, while the editor throws ambiguity over what the player would have heard in the room during recording, and what may have been added after. Carmen Morales often pauses as if flinching at a particularly crooked prepared note, while elsewhere she lets a beautiful melody unfurl as though oblivious to the little clatters and hiccups that impede its delivery. She moves between charged, staccato spontaneity and liquid bliss, highlighting the piano’s preparedness and also breezing right past it, as the spectre of that preparatory self thickens and dissipates accordingly.

The notions of space and atmosphere become equally tricky to unpick. The opening track sets the expectation that this is an unrefined live recording, rife with creaks and footsteps, documenting these interactions with the piano in real-time. Yet the space soon mutates, the walls blurring, the keys melting, culminating in the cave-drips and saturated echoes of the closing track, by which point the piano is hanging, shapeless and gravity-defiant, within a reality several links away from our own. A definition of “critters” is included in the record’s accompanying text: “small entities, subvisible creatures that proliferate everywhere and transform the composition of the living world, enabling mutation”. The implication, perhaps, is that all of the reality-augmentation on this album stems from that initial preparatory self, inserting tiny disruptions into the reality of the player, which gradually compound until we find ourselves swerving hard into zones of pure fantasy.