Dublin: Heavy Dublin LP

More gorgeous, hazed dreamweaving from mysterio label wherethetimegoes - the same crew that gave us a pair of stunners from Princ€ss and Nashpaints, here dissolving Dublin's special blend of peak Celtic futurism into a suite of effervescent fiddle-laced electroacoustic experiments that turn everyday musical elements into vivid, lysergic space-age landscapes, smeared with VHS infidelities.

Like Princ€ss, we've no idea who Dublin are - they're a "post modern classical" duo, as far as we can tell - but there's at least a breadcrumb trail. They emerged back in 2022 on wherethetimegoes with a CDr of bizarre jams, seemingly on violin and synth, that put them fully into their own zone, seamlessly blending Celtic folk music, West Coast new age, Eno-esque ambient and downtown-era improv without even trying to flex. 'Heavy Dublin' picks up where that set left off, presenting a similarly anonymous sequence of jams that pack into roughly the same creative space. "Oh," a voice exclaims in the opening seconds of 'Untitled 4', heralding a thick wall of digital synths and soundscapes that's sliced thru by a Conrad-esque pitch-wonked violin performance that's amplified in a way that's at odds with the other sounds. It's almost drawing a line in the sand, exclaiming that the fiddle is from our world and doesn't need to be sculpted to fit into another. And it's the perfect introduction.

On 'Untitled 2', the vibrating, powdery fiddle improvisations shiver across the kind of rhythmic, metallophone-like synth loops that you might find on any number of early Detroit techno b-sides. It's a canny reference, using two distinct future projections to create something new, an off-world cogitation from an unmistakably contemporary source that projects past the stratosphere towards a 'Solaris'-style space station. And the atmosphere continues to grow on 'Untitled 3', with subtlly glitchy rhythmic interjections that interrupt the flow of brushed aluminum synths and mangled acoustic instrumentation. It's Visible Cloaks' Fairlight futures meets Laura Cannell's archeofiction, a muddle of imaginations that pull us backwards and forwards on the timeline all at once. Similarly, there's a trace of Arthur Russell's reverb-heavy 'World of Echo' steez on 'Untitled 7', caught in a tangle of bit-chewed samples and noisy digital outbursts.

The album seems to build up to 'Untitled 5', a weightless cloud of steel pan loops, obscured voices, chimes and harmonically rich fiddle scrapes that sounds as if it's hanging off the timeline by a thread, linking Takehisa Kosugi's 'Catch Wave' concept into a catalog of sounds that you'd more readily find in the world of tape traders and private press 12"s. Fully mind-melting gear, no doubt.