Beau Wazner - A Dead Person’s Monologue

Album

14 Mar

The decrepit basement sounds of Beau Wanzer are back on the new release, A Dead Person's Monologue (2023). This time the Chicago resident applies their trademark lurking sound to iDEAL Recordings. By now, Beau Wanzer has become synonymous with a sound that reflects horror movies and early synth and electro genre aesthetics. A Dead Person's Monologue provides fans of Wanzer's a music injection of infectious grooves guaranteed to create dance floor zombies of us, fittingly.

The exciting part of Wanzer's productions lies in the ability to evoke these horror tropes differently. Some tracks, such as ‘Plaster Class' and' Simple Men', use haunting chords, pulsating rhythms, or sustained notes to instil a sense of dread. The former uses remarkably dry textural rhythms that ebb and flow around the jaunty off-kilter percussion. ‘Plaster Class’ had a relentless bass note to counter the dry sweeps that take centre stage. Conversely, ‘Simple Men’ opts for sustained chords that, when isolated, could be heard as jovial, but in the context, they sound ominous. Wanzer utilises the horror trope of the kid's nursery rhymes in this track. ‘Simple Men’ uses the contradiction of jovial sounds, nursery rhymes, and the ominous presence of danger in the same way in different forms.

On the other hand, Wanzer can be much more explicit in production, using sampled sounds and clever synthesis tricks to state horror implicitly. Wanzer is wise in this way, ‘Grumps’ combines a ticking hat with a chorus of bells in the background of the track. The bells will be very familiar to English readers as most of us living in more rural areas get a chorus of them daily. Still, their secondary context is the bell tolling, which signifies something terrible that Wanzer harnesses. They represent a religious doctrine, medieval darkness, witchcraft possession and monsters. ‘Warm Waterboarding’ uses bass notes to evoke not only a sense of dread at what's to come, but as a squeaking synth enters the track, it becomes more apparent that the bass is the rumbling of a boiler, rusted and decerped struggling to pump stagnant water through rumbling pipework straining to contain the water flowing through them. As the track evolves, Wanzer adds Voices that repeat unintelligibly. Violent instructions echo around an empty chamber, presenting the track as voyeuristic sounds of graphic activity. The title track, ‘A Dead Person's Monologue’, uses duality to create horror, filling the track with dread—duality in the form of contrasting vocals. The vocal starts muted with a more oppressive line being added as though we become the villain. The muffled voice feels like that of the victim blissfully unaware of our presence, and the deeper voice in our head, demonic in nature, instructing us to strike. This use of dual vocals echoes the voyeurism of ‘Warm Waterboarding’ as Wanzer often uses vocal effects to either straight-up make a demonic-sounding voice or, and where I feel it is more effective, puts us in a position where we are either hiding from or stalking another, bringing the horror aspects to full circle.

Beau Wanzer uses these horror tropes to construct visceral, textured tracks, but these horror elements aren't created in a vacuum. Wanzer's use of musique concrete production styles, the utilisation of tape and the heavy use of audio effects, primarily on percussion, is the real meat of Beau Wanzer's music so unique. The Chicagoan thrives for tape saturation, using it not only to add a warm roundness to productions but in the context of horror tropes analogue horror is still a subject very close to many people. The saturation can be seen as static on VHS, blurring the viewer's vision, techniques implemented with great success in found footage films like The Blair Witch Project. In this pursuit of analogue horror, Wanzer also succeeds with using tape delay. Wanzer cranks the feedback when applying it to percussion. This mimics a stuttering effect like Samara's videotape effects in The Ring. Before I heard cries about style over substance, all these aesthetic decisions serve the music. The analogue effects are used to create new and exciting grooves. Delayed kicks push the track forward while spring reverb on claps pushes the audio tail just behind the beat, introducing a slackness like J Dilla.

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