Here’s a question: does an artist owe you anything? Should they consider you, the potential audience, when creating their art? Do they have an obligation to teach you how to experience their art?
And here’s another one to slosh around in your noggin: is it virtuous in its own right for art to be abrasive and confrontational? Or does abrasive, confrontational art still need to accomplish something else? To put it differently: can unpleasant art provide pleasure through its sheer determination to be unpleasant? Or does it require the intervention of a listener or viewer who can find the pleasure despite the intentional unpleasantness?
If you have no prior affinity for industrial black metal, The Decaying Multiverse is not the album to make you a convert. For the rest of us, though, Dyoxidon has tapped into the same diseased cybernetic vein that runs through artists like Mysticum, the Axis of Perdition (particularly The Ichneumon Method), the Berzerker, Darkspace, Zyklon, Thee Maldoror Kollective, and early Anaal Nathrakh. The Decaying Multiverse also sounds a bit like Blut Aus Nord’s The Work Which Transforms God played at about triple-speed.
“Psychosomatic Harvest” opens the album with discomfiting noise and samples, eventually joined by slithering guitar lines and drum programming that hits like a synthetic battering ram. Around the song’s midpoint, the guitars tumble into a half-time lurch while the drums work overtime, creating a disorienting mix and fast and slow that sounds a little bit like Godflesh recording an album of psytrance for Moonfog Records.
As the album goes on, several aspects of its construction that would probably be criticisms of most other albums actually emerge as strengths. The vocals – a hoarse, staticky gnashing of teeth – are so heavily processed that they sometimes bleed into and become indistinguishable from the overall noise and industrial ambience. The drum programming sometimes runs so fast that it ceases to have a rhythmic effect and instead becomes a whirring drone. The guitars race and stutter, often flailing beneath the drums, but then they snake up in a writhing arc before retreating back into the binary swamp. In fact, although Dyoxidon’s sound is vastly different, I sometimes feel it has a strange kinship with the abstract, collapsed death metal of Portal.
Dyoxidon’s music sometimes feels like a quivering mass of hyperspeed stasis, like a cosmic string vibrating faster than the speed of light while kicking off waves of gravitation disruption. Because the majority of The Decaying Multiverse lives in such a space of overlapping violence, the moments that offer even slight reprieve stand out all the more sharply. Around the 3:20 mark of “Light of a Cybernetic Sun,” for example, the overheated thump of the drums suddenly vanishes, taking the bottom out of the universe. What follows is several minutes of the most lovely, unalloyed calm that the album offers, and it even reorients the song’s attitude when the guitars and drums finally reemerge, turning them, if not gentle, then at least somewhat welcoming. “Extinction Errata” also flips the script, opening with a few minutes of glitching electronic music that underscores Dyoxidon’s influences from the worlds of industrial, ambient, and breakcore. Album closer “Spectravore,” meanwhile, has a few sections that slip into a sassy, borderline funky breakbeat groove as the song hurtles toward whatever digital oblivion awaits.
The Decaying Multiverse is not a friendly album. It is noisy, imposing, abrasive, impassive, meticulous in its malevolence. It is also remarkably accomplished and, for just the right kind of peculiar listener, a lot of fun.
