The throwback house and techno that forms the foundation of DUST's Agony Planet has long been overrun with producers aiming for the crispest, clearest, most audiophile-quality sounds the human mind can conceive of, but the Brooklyn trio goes in the opposite direction. They have coated their debut album in a fine layer of hiss and sonic grime, and if you’ve been around dance music for long, the murkiness might remind you of a time before the post-scarcity age of streaming music, when rave devotees would trade cassette dubs of rare 12''s.
Or it might remind you of an overdriven P.A., pushed far past its capabilities to power some kind of under-the-radar, probably illegal rave. Coming out of the Brooklyn DIY electronic music scene, that’s something DUST's members–John Barclay, Mike Sherburn, and Greem Jellyfish–know all about. Barclay in particular is a tireless advocate for pre-EDM, pre-superclub rave ethics, which he wove deeply into the events he threw at already-legendary spaces like 285 Kent (which he helped open, and where DUST was among the last acts to play before it was shuttered) and Trip House, a run-down Bushwick mansion that he turned into a 20-room party palace. More recently he’s gone legit with the Bossa Nova Civic Club, whose shadowy back room has become a mecca for hardcore house and techno freaks.
Barclay’s ventures as a promoter suggest not just nostalgia for a time when dance music was still dangerous, but a fairly successful attempt to yank that kind of seductively undomesticated energy out of the good old days and into the here and now. Agony Planet fits into that scheme nicely. The music has a raw edge that comes part from the redlined production and part from the relentless body-jacking four-on-the-floor beats and stroboscopic synth arpeggios, as well as tempos that feel pitched up a few percentages by the type of DJ who likes to test their audience’s physical endurance.
Singer Greem Jellyfish, a multimedia artist who designs her own surreal stage costumes, helps push the album’s manic energy over into madness. Inverting the concept of a disco diva, she yelps, shrieks, and moans her vocal parts, drawing out the dark, slightly sadistic quality woven into the beats, and really all good techno in general. Her frequently wordless vocalizing suggests someone who’s lost her mind so thoroughly to the music that she’s gone post-verbal.
When Agony Planet really comes together—and it doesn't, always, but it's a hard spot to locate— on tracks like "Alien Prey" and "Tell Me," the effect is downright magical. It can transport you to an unrehabbed industrial loft or maybe even the abandoned loading dock where I went to one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life, and recreates those transcendent moments where the DJ finds the sweet spot as close to the edge of blowing out the P.A. as they can get and all the individual spirals of drug-altered moods on the floor line up and the whole dingy space seems to lift off from Earth. And then it’ll make you want to go out this weekend and find that same sensation all over again.
