A scan through Dan Drohan’s Bandcamp page reveals a musician restlessly tinkering with the molecular structure of composition. The Massachusetts-based drummer and producer’s forays into exploratory electronic composition with real-time drums mostly defy classification. Maybe these attempts to create new forms of beauty and intrigue in sound could be called “organic cyborg music.” Amid all the weirdness in his latest album You’re a Crusher / drocan! is a pop record struggling to emerge from the wires. Slivers of melody shoot through the cacophony, but they quickly become subsumed in the pile-up of disjointed rhythms and melted-plastic textures. This perpetual battle gives the album’s its essential friction.
You’re a Crusher / drocan! is divided into two segments, the first ostensibly experimental and the second nominally pop. But to call drocan! “pop” is like calling the idea of death a nuisance. Created with multi-instrumentalist Mike Cantor, the poppier section that comprises the second half of the record indulges in fun-house-mirrored studio wizardry. “The Garden” evokes Cornelius’ 1997 album Fantasma, but on much stronger and stranger drugs, its angelic vocals reverbed into a choir of anomie. “Passwords” sounds like a brutalist version of Japanese city pop, with Drohan pounding out kettledrum thunder. “Through the Night” purveys cherubic Panda Bear vibes, but is much less cloying.
As diverting as drocan! is, it’s the first half, You’re a Crusher, that delivers the real fireworks. “Leave it Loading” rides rickety, uptempo beats and a wonky, foghorn-like bassline akin to Hugh Hopper’s in early Soft Machine over decaying yet vibrant keyboard dabs. This alien, warehouse-pop aura splits the difference between Swell Maps and This Heat. “You’re a Crusher” serves as the bridge to drocan!, filtering Animal Collective’s awry-mushroom-trip inversion of the Beach Boys through Black Dice’s warp-everything-to-the-max mulcher. “CUPOFDRO” comes across as a modern American take on Autechre’s bafflingly complex IDM puzzles. The cumulative effect of this rampant sonic distortion is a cheerful kind of madness. Drohan creates his own bizarre universe out of a mix of organic and synthetic elements, and then arrays the parts in often breathtakingly original ways. He may not be reinventing the wheel, but he is retrofitting it with some spectacular rims.
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