Sometimes I think it can't be a matter of simple coincidence that sound, when rendered visually, appears as ever-changing green fluctuations stretched over an infinite black void. The power of music to seemingly construct, alter and distort space can be staggering. Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, the second album from French electronic duo M83, nicely epitomizes this: The sound is absolutely huge, its relentless attention to detail eclipsed only by the stunning emotional power it conveys. For fifty-seven glorious minutes, its impossibly intricate tapestry of buzzing techno synthesizers, distorted electric guitars, cheesy drum machines, and subdued vocals generate a sense of bodily movement through a landscape of beauty, disappointment, glory, and decrepitude. Dead Cities not only envelops you, but also affords you room to explore its vast expanse.
One remarkable attribute of Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is how vastly M83's sound palette differs from the ones most often used to create music possessing this much beauty and depth. Countless musicians have humanized electronic sounds by generating tones that feel warm or organic, but M83 have undertaken a different challenge: to convey beauty through the familiar, filtered buzz of the kind of cheap synthesizers usually found in techno and dance tracks. Paradoxically, the sounds that have constituted some of the most vapid, hedonistic, and forgettable music of our time have now returned to make us cry.
M83 open Dead Cities with one of their most striking misappropriations of trite instrumentation. In "Birds", a tinny sample of chirping birds is combined with swells of synth strings and a computerized voice repeating, "Sun is shining, birds are singing, flowers are growing, clouds are looming and I am flying." The computerized voice is run through an odd, wavering melodic filter that affords it just the right degree of harmonic dissonance with the accompanying synths, and it takes on a decidedly unsettling feel, repeating its mantra-like invocation of the unsteady world you're about to enter.
Once inside, you're exposed to a landscape of seemingly infinite depth and complexity. Rather than just ending, sounds and songs disappear off into the horizon, continually bringing a promise of something familiar but unforeseen to follow. "Unrecorded", the first full-fledged song on Dead Cities, makes clear the reason M83 have drawn so many My Bloody Valentine comparisons. Building upon a foundation of fuzzed-out guitar, rich bass, synth strings, and a drum machine that sounds surprisingly like the acoustic drums of Loveless, the duo layers burbling techno synthesizers into complex rhythmic intersections as the song's vast backdrop slowly fades away. Just as My Bloody Valentine refashioned distorted electric guitars as instruments capable of divine and volatile sound, M83 recast harsh sawtooth waves as voices of reflection and regret. On "Run into Flowers", almost-real strings and whispered vocals are juxtaposed with overdriven drum machine clicks, as an insistent 4/4 beat evokes lush, green fields as easily as abandoned factories and polluted rivers.
This kind of contrast factors heavily into "In Church", as a clear pipe organ and an angelic, reverb-laden chorus are assaulted by blasts of white noise. Finally, a wrenching, synthesized melody enters, providing a profoundly moving counterpoint to the sterile beauty that preceded it. By the time you get to "0078h", it's impossible to tell whether the heavily altered vocals are of human or computerized origin; it's also completely ceased to matter. Oftentimes, the most organic sounds on Dead Cities are the most formless, and the most glaringly synthetic sounds the most emotional.
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts ends fittingly with the 14-minute epic "Beauties Can Die", which recalls at first the melodic, pastoral electronica of Múm's Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is OK. This peaceful opening is soon overtaken by a sound that gradually transforms from a low, earthquake-like rumble into a blast of synthesized static. Synthesizers and harmony vocals are layered and layered until the sound is so explosively, beautifully gigantic that you won't mind it's damaging your hearing. More earthquake rumbles follow, each ushering in even more layers of ungodly gorgeous sound and evoking a stomach-turning combination of fear and excitement. At the crash of a synthesized cymbal, the song descends into submerged ambience, and ultimately into a long silence, before resurfacing with distorted radar blips and shrieks of howling noise.
As "Beauties Can Die" fades, you're left with the feeling that you've just returned from a journey-- that the images passing through your mind for the last hour couldn't possibly have been the result of mere imagination. An album like this extends far beyond your speakers, guiding you through an impossibly rich, detailed world of sound while also giving you room to explore it yourself; you don't listen to Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, you inhabit it.
