DIVIDE AND DISSOLVE unleash a rapt act of resistance.
A rapt and radical act of resistance from Australia’s drone doom duo
‘GASLIGHTING’ HAS BECOME one of the defining terms of 2020. While it was initially associated with emotional abuse in toxic personal relationships, the last year has shown us that whole communities can be gaslit. It is now also a political tool, used to make the oppressed and the marginalised question their own lived realities. People of colour, women and LGBTQ+ people are told that discrimination is only in their heads, that they’re overreacting, that their voices don’t count as part of our cultural and political discourse. So, Gas Lit is a perfectly fitting album title for Divide And Dissolve. The Australian duo of Native descent channel their history and struggles through noise – partly because they cannot be told through words. Their aim: to destroy the white supremacist colonial frameworks that are still omnipresent.
The debate about politics within music rages on, but Gas Lit proves that music is politics. It can be confrontational, it can be cathartic; it’s a mirror of who and where we are, who and where we want to be as a society. Even the escapism you can find through music can be seen as a political act – just as the mere existence of Divide And Dissolve as a band of indigenous women can be seen as an act of resistance. The crushing heaviness of their drone doom bears the weight of centuries of oppression, but also the beauty of their true nature when it’s untethered by white supremacy, colonialism and patriarchy.
Through their monolithic riffs, feedback and Sylvie Nehill’s raw drumming, guitarist Takiaya Reed gently weaves strands of subtle but suspenseful saxophone melodies that reverberate like a distant call from the past, sent out by Mother Earth herself. There lies a primal power in Gas Lit, an ability to both rip open and heal our wounds. The answer to what we can take away from this – other than a brilliant doom record – lies in the spoken-word track Did You Have Something To Do With It: ‘This is our time. Our spirit is […] waiting on us to decide what it is that we will honour while we’re alive.’ ■■■■■■■■■■
FOR FANS OF: Sumac, Ragana, Insect Ark CHRISTINA WENIG