Data Breaker

Dwelling in the subbasement of Seattle’s experimental-music
underground, Dialing In (Reita Piecuch) creates haunting
traumlieder, egoless pieces forged from scavenged instruments
and samples lifted from unknown records and Russian 78s,
bolstered by surreptitious snippets from Fleetwood Mac, the Moody
Blues, R. D. Burman, and Sandy Bull releases. Sruti box, guitar, and
piano complement the foraged audio scraps, which are mulched into oddly
nutritious drones beamed in with ritualistic intensity. From
impoverished circumstances, Dialing In forges rich tapestries of
exotic, distressed sound design.

The Dialing In aesthetic can be likened to the accidental, poignant
beauty of film stock deteriorating, of photographs fading—a
sepia-toned seepage of sound. It’s akin to the odor of used-book
stores whose stock has been moldering since the first half of the 20th
century, their tomes of yellowed pages and disintegrating bindings
whispering of the tragically mundane mortality of human bodies and
ideas.

A common Dialing In motif involves Asha Bhosle–esque voices
ululating or keening over decaying, blurry drones and eroded
oscillations that accrue grit and emotional heft with each passing
minute. They’re not so much songs as they are hymns to forgotten
ancestors. You may find yourself overcome with grief for people you’ll
never meet in a thousand lifetimes. That’s the beauty and power that
this music exerts.

After two compelling CDs—2005’s Ketalysergicmetha
Mother and 2006’s Cows in Lye—for two different New
Zealand labels, Dialing In now offers her third album, The
Islamic Bomb (on jade green vinyl, limited-edition, 500 copies
from Connecticut-based Music Fellowship; www.musicfellowship.com). The LP
refracts field recordings retrieved during Piecuch’s recent trip to
Pakistan. She submerges muezzin prayer calls and street-urchin
chatter into piano études and enigmatic audio detritus, and
then churns the raw materials into hypnotic, psychedelic symphonies
that ooze like black bile.

“Griselda Plans Her Revenge” is one of the most heartbreakingly
gorgeous pieces of music ever to ripple through my gray matter. A
female melismatically trills a lamentation while another woman
coos/hums in a lower register and a languid harp (I think) burbles
beneath them. “Earl Grey” emits metallic fibrillations like a more
blissful Vibracathedral Orchestra over what sounds like a muffled
“Willow’s Song” from The Wicker Man soundtrack. On “We Burn Our
Stillborns,” a woman speaks in indecipherable Urdu while a momentous
melody puffs its chest in defiance in the face of doom. It sounds like
a climactic piece of film music being engulfed in flames.

Death may be the mother of beauty, as the saying goes, but
decomposition as practiced by Dialing In can lead to alluring, enduring
art, as well.