DMT users often report encounters with so-called “machine elves,” entities that exist outside of reality as we normally perceive it, manipulating events in our universe from behind the scenes without most people knowing. Tim DeWit is sort of like a machine elf for pop’s avant garde, doing influential, mind-bending work that ripples across huge swaths of culture while remaining largely unknown to anyone who hasn’t been properly enlightened. He was a founding member of Gang Gang Dance, and co-produced their landmark 2008 album Saint Dymphna after a gunshot wound to his chest ended his stint as their drummer. He’s performed at the zeitgeisty Ghe2o G0th1k parties, composed music for the fashion line Hood By Air, contributed to the soundtrack for the Baltimore biker documentary 12 O’Clock Boys, and was sampled on Yeezus. If it’s edgy, weird, and involves electronic music in any way, DeWit’s probably brushed up against it.
IN.RAK.DUST is DeWit’s first full-length release under the name Dutch E Germ, and his most substantial artistic statement since Saint Dymphna. In some ways it feels like a continuation of that album’s aesthetic mission, and in some ways it even feels like an improvement. That said, the differences between DeWit’s two projects are numerous. While GGD acted like an art rock band that often incorporated elements of hip-hop, house, and grime into its sound, Dutch E Germ almost entirely removes rock from the equation, with DeWit applying his psychedelic filter directly to various forms of bass music. And where his work with GGD was often masked behind a thick sonic haze, IN.RAK.DUST has a bracing hi-fi clarity to its booms and crackles.
What hasn’t changed is DeWit’s ambitious range of influences—IN.RAK.DUST is rooted in hip-hop and house but incorporates everything from trap rap to something that sounds like a Bollywood ballad with dozens of stops in between—and his gift for assembling them into pleasingly weird and intensely trippy new forms. Losing the blurry analog noise elements of GGD’s sound hasn’t affected DeWit’s ability to impart his recordings with a shimmering, mushroomy aura, and he’s become a master of transforming electronic glitches into 21st century psychedelia, as he did with the flickering, stroboscopic meltdown of a vocal sample from “IntroXXXWar” (originally released as “HBA War”) that Kanye lifted for the intro to “New Slaves”. He also remains conscientious about maintaining an impressively accessible vibe even when he goes far out, and the album’s danceable even at its most experimental moments.
With IN.RAK.DUST, DeWit’s accomplished what seems to have been his goal for years: the creation of a new kind of dub, a worthy spiritual descendent to the music that emanated out of Studio One and the Black Ark back in the day while sounding almost nothing like it. Too many of dub’s progeny have borrowed its sonic palette but not its philosophy of mad technological experimentation, which was the whole point of the style. Even when he’s creating a track from scratch it still feels like an assemblage put together from disparate parts—a house beat, a reggae bassline, a synth lead picked up from a Southern rap song—that just happen to fit together perfectly. He also knows that gear sometimes sounds best when used in unintended ways, and IN.RAK.DUST is full of off-label programming, and electronics pushed into glitchy places they weren’t designed for. It’s easily one of the most technically daring and impressively produced albums of the year so far.
One other crucial thing that DeWit’s music has in common with dub is that even at its most haywire it remains spiritually centered, although that’s not necessarily apparent. The album doesn’t have any one obviously prescribed use—you can dance to it as easily as you can choreograph a runway show to it, or you could just use it as a soundtrack for getting high. My favorite way to listen to IN.RAK.DUST is to put on my best and bassiest headphones and experience it while I travel around the city. In DeWit’s hands, even the most crowded subway becomes serene and blissful, and the most mundane task deeply cosmic.
