This summer, Dedekind Cut—the artist born Fred Warmsley, formerly known as Lee Bannon—began aggregating songs in a Spotify playlist titled “Ambient Essentials.” It’s an eclectic and personal collection of favorites within that wide-ranging umbrella: Julianna Barwick’s calm vocal loops, metallic harmonies by Autechre and Oneohtrix Point Never, Laraaji’s glimmering New Age. Warmsley gives the impression of a dedicated listener; this mix felt less like a toolbox than a window into some music he’s used to make sense of the world.
As the prolific Warmsley has accumulated releases under his various monikers, his relationship with genre has shifted. He got his start producing instrumentals for Joey Bada$$ and the Pro Era crew, serving as their touring DJ in 2012. His output has since progressed from industrial beat-driven instrumentals to blistering jungle and techno, most recently landing in an eerie, arrhythmic place. Since adopting the moniker Dedekind Cut last year, Warmsley has put out three EPs, most recently the cassette American Zen, which comprised four tracks’ worth of even-keeled, dread-tinged drone. On $uccessor, his first Dedekind full-length, this sound emerges notably more grandiose, and more sinister. Leading up to the album’s release, Warmsley tweeted: “The parts you find ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty about [my] work as the Dedekind Cut will surely become its signature.”
Though “ugly” may be an overstatement, $uccessor is marked by the productive discomfort that accompanies such unabashed intensity. Whereas American Zen maintained a temperate pace, $uccessor isn’t afraid to crescendo or screech to a halt. This isn’t background music; it’s cinematic, full of movement. Most of all, it’s cavernous. The gently lapping, William Basinski-esque tones of opener “Descend from now” are swallowed 90 seconds in by strings and oceanic tape hiss. This gives way to “Instinct,” in which a fuzzy rhythm, layered beneath a pretty synth melody, builds to an urgent gallop. As Warmsley blends flat, chilly digital tones and analogue elements (including a field recording of birdsong), the disjuncture further pries open this sometimes uncomfortably vast sonic landscape. Warmsley deftly bridges his influences, braiding liquid futurism into the textural warmth of disintegrating tape loops.
There are moments when Warmsley loosens his compositional grip; tracks like “Fear in reverse” and “5ucc3550r” meander a bit, crackling and heaving without the insistence that characterizes much the rest of this release. But these slips into plotless quiet are among $uccessor’s most unsettling and purposeful moments. One review of March’s American Zen lamented that listeners “never find out what it’s trying to tell us”; asking Dedekind Cut to explain, however, seems a fundamental misunderstanding of the project’s vocabulary. A record can, of course, have a worldview without providing talking points.
$uccessor is undergirded by blackness: it was co-released by NON, the Chino Amobi-helmed collective of artists from Africa and its diaspora; its cover is Deana Lawson’s striking 2014 photograph Cowboys, of two young black men in jeans and chaps atop horses startled by the camera’s flash. As Dedekind Cut, Warmsley makes use of ambient tropes, but this album’s stakes are set far outside the boundaries of that genre. (In spirit and in sound, he’s perhaps better matched alongside his collaborators here, which include the protean likes of Amobi, Angel-Ho, and serpentwithfeet.) If ambient music—so often treated as a somehow ideologically neutral form, its canon overwhelmingly white, Western, and male—can be described as an atmospheric entity, it’s then deployed here to new, ambitious ends. Warmsley’s work is shot through with the violence, anxiety, and fracture that pervade our atmosphere today. But on tracks like the stunning “46:50,” which features muffled vocals from Active Child, an elegiac softness also reaches out to the listener, offering solace.
Warmsley has offered a remarkably expansive example of what these pliable forms can do. He seems winkingly aware, also, of the loaded nature of invoking a vast frontier. At a performance of $uccessor at New York’s Issue Project Room in October, old-school country music blasted as Warmsley walked onto the fog-filled stage, a curious counterpoint to the textural drone that followed. This, alongside Lawson’s Cowboys, points to a canny appropriation of the frontier narratives that have, I’d posit, quietly served as scaffolding for much of the Western experimental music canon. $uccessor marks a taking of the reins, so to speak, a direction that will hopefully continue to propel Dedekind Cut.
