Diving Saucer Attack by Senking & DYL
Bass and drum
German artist Senking (Jens Massel) has been on my radar for a while, mainly via his organic and sinister, bass-heavy albums on Raster-Noton, but DYL is a new name. For more than a decade the Romanian artist has established a similar reputation for making dark music but DYL (real name Eduard Costea) focuses more on an atmospheric form of Drum & Bass, not far from the Autonomic style of Instra:Mental and dBridge. In this 30 minute album 1 four tracks are credited as collaborative, with a solo track from each. And as you may expect, bass is a key element.
The opening wobbly bass on first track Six Doors Down sets the scene, sputtering out fragmented shapes before a spooky melody unites the disparity. It's a solo Senking track and it leeches into 2024 (the first of their collabs) by adopting the same discordant bass noises before DYL's ghostly rhythms emerge. DYL's solo track a7r380R follows and expands the skeletal Drum & Bass elements into full-on head-nodding mode. Its yearning circular synth riff aids accessibility but it's the absence of Senking's dreaded bass that offers timely respite. The title track is a creepy mash-up of their individual styles, with a grainy experimental intro building out a bass rhythm with echoes of the melody from Six Doors Down dropping in and out. Haunted Dub Techno is the only way to describe Astral Projection and pinpoints where their interests converge. Finally, Not Just Numbers feels like an Ambient track even if you fail to appreciate the grandfather clock ticking away in the background.
Collaborations like this produce the most memorable results when the initial inputs differ radically. In this case both artists inhabit too much shared ground (dark, rhythmic, occasionally demanding). The pair have distinctively embodied the key elements of their individual art, and done so with subtle flair, but it doesn't feel like there's been much friction in the decision making.
1. Diving Saucer Attack is not their first collaboration, back in 2019 they produced an EP with DB1 called Uniformity of Nature and the sound was a lot more austere