There’s always been something fascinatingly off about Aaron Dilloway. While his bandmates in Wolf Eyes, with whom he played during their quintessential early-2000s run, screamed and thrashed around with maces, Dilloway could be spotted side stage—appearing oddly forlorn and entranced, jaw slightly slack with a contact mic secured to the inside of his cheek. A wire would dangle out from his mouth and hang in front of his guitar. After he split from the group, Dilloway took an unexpected left turn and moved to Kathmandu, Nepal to record the Nath family, a group of snake charmers he met while “roaming the streets and villages… in search of sounds and music.” But it’s in his solo work that things get really weird.
Noise music often explores themes of catharsis, using blistering volumes and shredded textures to transport artists and listeners into states outside music’s generally agreed upon borders. The abrasiveness both weeds out unwilling audience members and shields the artists. After all, if you don’t like it, you probably just don’t get it. Not so with Dilloway, whose music exudes a raw vulnerability and needling playfulness. On 2012’s Modern Jester, this approach reached its most definitive form, painstakingly stretching grimy tape loops into a rich tapestry of grotty discomfort.
The Gag File is his follow-up to Modern Jester and is every bit as rewarding and unnerving as its predecessor, though at almost half the length, it’s easier to digest. Opener “Ghost” grabs on immediately with a simple, warbling synth drone and a lurching rhythm. On paper it doesn’t sound like much, but Dilloway strikes just the right balance between dread and curiosity. (It feels sticky and unclean, but what exactly is it?) Later, murmured vocals slide into the mix, evoking the dead-eyed whisperings of a B-movie serial killer. “Karaoke With Cal” inverts the dynamic, foregrounding a man’s voice, now choked and gasping in a field of light tape hiss and nothing else, before introducing a heaving, lonely piano figure.
The rest of the record moves this way, stumbling and crawling through sonic debris. “Inhuman Form Reflected” blends crowd noises—maybe from a rollercoaster, maybe from something more disastrous—around lethargic synth progressions. It ends with a sole figure groaning, screaming in panic, and eventually collapsing. Later, “No Eye Sockets (For Otto & Sindy)” contorts a field-recording of a bar; the convivial chuckles and throwback alt-rock bubbling up in the midst of the album’s descent leaves you on edge.
Dilloway has recently collaborated live with Genesis P-Orridge, and the pairing makes complete sense. You can trace a direct line between the slippery, sing-song horror of “Hamburger Lady” and The Gag File—the album’s terror, weirdness, and ambiguity feel just as resonant. Listening at the gym in the middle of the day, with an array of TVs tuned to Trump, “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” and infomercials for “revolutionary cleaning products,” I couldn’t think of a better soundtrack.
Almost all of these songs hinge on some kind of rhythm, but never the sort that typically drives music forward. These are the rhythms of wheezing, broken down washer-dryers in decrepit basements, the sound of motorik after all the motors are rusted through. Dilloway skips climactic narrative arcs for an unblinking emotional purity, and unlike his compatriots’ work in Wolf Eyes, The Gag File is never guarded, nor overtly dystopian. As rugged as the album can get, Dilloway maintains a diaristic tone—honest, to-the-point, and open to interpretation. One can’t help but imagine him wandering around his old stomping grounds of Detroit, a sly observer taking notes on the city’s eerie mixture of blight, renewal, danger, and possibility. There’s a clear affection for detritus here, an internal logic that reckons both with rot and the damp, fungal growth that follows. Haunted by the ghosts of its own industries, the Midwest has bred a noise underground that feels uniquely disinterested in the hope, warmth, and empathy music can offer. After all, what good would it do?
