Label: Independent
Band: Divide and Dissolve
Origin: Australia

It’s convenient sometimes to think that the whole world is alright. We’re wrong though. Divide and Dissolve are highlighting some issues that are still part of our landscape and life. White supremacy is, according to Takiaya Reed and Sylvie Nehill, still a part of the world around us and the wounds of the past have not fully healed. That is what ‘Abomination’ is about.

Takiaya is part Cherokee and Sylvie part Maaori. Their music is designed to decolonize and decentralize and pay homage to the ancestors. With drums, guitar, saxophone, and live effects, they make music that shakes the walls and breaks down common perceptions of the world around us. I’m hooked. From a comfortable background, it’s too easy for me to say that all is well when there’s still so much hurt in the world. Luckily, those voices are heard.

The music is absolutely punishing with erratic patterns and a deep, droning vibe to it on opening track ‘Abomination’. The drums are so you feel them inside your bones before we get into the eerie intro of ‘Assimilation’. Almost painful, almost grotesque, is it still a beautiful howling effect that you here? Before you can really process it, the lumbering bass and drums hit you again. It stomps and curdles onward, through the next track, all the way to ‘Reversal’, which is a spoken word section about the immigrant mind. The light music support only emphasizes the words, makes them stronger and more potent. It’s touching in its alienating form, but also is the only word of explanation the record offers us.

At times the music almost feels ritualistic or even slightly jazzy, like the tune ‘Resistance’. There’s a mystique, a feeling of movie-like suspense to the tune. Repetitive riffs come by, enriched with even further effects and sounds that take you into this trippy realm. The sound is strangely subdued, almost inaudible at times and less structured on ‘Re-Appropriation’ and ‘Reparations’. They feel like strange sound experiments, full of droning bass lines.

‘Indigenous Sovereignty’ is the short, but foreboding closer of the album. Perhaps a sign, a light, showing what is to come in the following years. Guiding the path for change.