DoF: "Overtaken by Moss"

In space, no one can hear you scream; on Mars, nothing can grow except moss; Doff™ garden weedkiller’s just been banned in the UK. Connect these events via crooked astrology and you have “Overtaken by Moss” by DoF (or Pennsylvania’s Brian Hulick as his taxman likes to call him). Hulick may well have actually been in space for all his recent activity—his last uploads to MySpace were some acoustic Christmas covers a year ago—but now he’s back with an entire album for P*Dis Tokyo: the imprint to go to for robot/folk sounds when everyone back home says “put beats in it.” Hulick’s sixth album, Suddenly Shifting Against The Sky, is a feisty little jewel of a bedroom record—with slick beats a-plenty, in fact—and his hiatus and time eating berries in the wild has mixed a picnic Buddhism into his work, nature now crackling where there once was just lots of machines. Crackling.

A skip to the mossy place shows that DoF 2010’s composition skills have blossomed to be almost as fertile as his lichen muses. “Overtaken by Moss” is what you’d call a classic washing powder track: smells fresh every time, works best spread in the sun, virtually stainless bar the odd crumb of detergent. A green tangle of banjos, glock, and frazzled hard disks gambol to a pacifist reveille, glitches hopping brazenly out of line as morning breaks calmly across the tree trunk. Like Scotland’s Frog Pocket, Hulick has that third ear for syncing haphazard drum programming with string movements in a way that doesn’t instantly induce convulsions, carefully adding sandblast effects to his midget triffid takeover. If you don’t normally go for the whole expertly-tidied-up-mess-of-nature shebang (my own idea of a window box is fly-paper), take a look at the way Hulick’s begun re-pollenating. It might make you want to go and lie still in a sunny field and realize you’re only a blip in the food chain.