DSX
Cold Ballads
self-released
The advent of Dejan Samardzic’s DSX project way back in 2012 provided an interesting perspective into the Haujobb member’s work as part of that group. Where the history of that project was largely defined by a sleek, design-heavy digital iteration of industrial, the minimal analogue electro of DSX connected to a deeper and more primal iteration of electronic music, no less considered, but with immediacy, tension and movement as its main characteristics.
Having laid fallow since the release of 2018’s Soviet Synthesizer, it came as something of a surprise to hear a new mini-album from DSX, and that was before taking the sound of Cold Ballads into account. While still trading in the kind of sparseness and atmosphere of the preceding EPs and singles, this era of DSX is far closer to Haujobb in terms of melodies and song structures. Indeed, it’s hard to listen to the pinched, syncopated stabs and delayed lead on “Dead Poem”, or the interplay between piano, pads and bass programming on “Unearthed” without thinking about the influential work Samardzic did on records like Polarity or Vertical Theory. Admittedly the songs themselves end up being quite different; the former brings in some subtly funky percussion beneath a simple kick-snare drum pattern and even tosses some naturalistic strings into the mix to evoke classic neue deutsch welle, while the latter seemingly deconstructs its own arrangement by the end, an approach that would seem improvisational if it wasn’t also so precise.
The other major element that sets the record apart from its predecessors is the addition of Samardzic’s partner Aleta Welling on vocals for each song. Hardly a stranger to industrial music fans (whether they know it or not – she notably contributed her voice to :Wumpscut:’s “Fear in Motion” and wrote the lyrics to all time club smash “Wreath of Barbs”), Welling’s icy, half-spoken delivery is an ideal fit for the material here, fitting nicely between the machinegunned snares and claps of the menacing “Grand Design” with forceful presence, and punching her way through the buzzing electronics, orch hits and pingy cowbells of “Slow Revolution” with a studied poise. Her distinct presence the mix is most welcome, providing a reference point for the more abstract moments, and an organic counterpoint to the exacting mechanical sound design.
Cold Ballads is about a fine return as we could expect from DSX, a project whose small output has remained an outsized presence in our listening over the last decade and a half. A reinvention that references both Samardzic’s extant work and the project’s own distinct identity in ways that inform both, it’s a unique take on minimal electro-industrial from a legitimate pioneer of the sound, who displays an intuitive and powerful understanding of its intricacies. Recommended.
