DAMAGE MÉCANIQUE thrusts the listener into a malfunctioning industrial sci-fi soundscape. Trance inducing guitars beckon with haunting wails, high-tension wires spin and spit with a crackling hiss. Circular kosmische rhythms and anxiety-drenched beats destroy and rebuild around fractured melodies and noise. The band oxidizes and melts into experimental post-punk and acousmatic environments as hypnotic groove and vertigo copulate in cinematic assemblage.
By distorting hard boiled film and classic instrumental music through a dark, overcast lens, Diminished Men refocus their influences into something entirely unique. Their jagged, hard-charging approach evokes images of slit jugulars and accelerated heart rates, all the while swathing you in a blissful claustrophobia. Drawing elements of Link Wray, Morricone's dissonant horror scores, gritty noir and Joe Meek's sickly productions, as well as the provocative imagery of filmmakers like Wim Wenders and Jean-Pierre Melville, synthesizing them into something truly organic and original.
"Capnomancy" (Jan 2013), their second release on Abduction Records, run by Alan Bishop of the legendary Sun City Girls and the Sublime Frequencies label, is a collection of stark instrumentals, full of high tension energy and infected terror. Cloaked in a supernatural fog and electrical storms, chiaroscuro landscapes read like a sci-fi postcard with a Giallo ransom note attached. One of the last albums to be recorded at his now defunct Aleph Studio, producer Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Earth, Wolves in the Throne Room, etc.) contributes greatly with his visceral, heavy production, making this album their darkest offering yet
Distorted through a shattered lens, Diminished Men refocus hard-boiled cinema and classic instrumental music into something entirely unique. Vision in Crime, their third LP on Sun City Girls' Abduction label, unfolds like a paranormal detective story full of delinquent exotica, deranged noir, hyperventilating surf, and shortwave radio nightmares. Opening number "Chamber," an apparition of a forensics crime scene investigation, sets the tone but quickly spirals into the cobra-twilight guitar work of Steve Schmitt on the Aegean Sea-inspired espionage-surf track "Oistros Dolorous." From here the band's mutant lounge carnage weaves through sinister cityscapes and plazas, kudzu-infested forests on the avant-spy jazz of "Kudzu Mine," lost island noir, hallucinatory gamelan rock, and phantom radio dispatches. By the time that mickey sets in, the title-track, a hauntingly gorgeous ballad, closes out the album. Diminished Men possess dangerous musical minds pulsing with nervous electricity, shattering Fender reverb, explodo-free jazz, and gorgeous, sometimes romantic melancholy. Featuring Steve Schmitt on guitars, drummer Dave Abramson (Master Musicians of Bukkake), and Simon Henneman on Bass VI. Vision in Crime includes special guest recording appearances by saxophonists Skerik (Critters Buggin, Garage a Trois, Wayne Horvitz) and Neil Welch(Bad Luck, King Tears Bat Trip). Limited edition of 500.
Six O'Clock Baby cobbles together stray oddities from the band's prodigious output; the resulting 11 tracks represent some of Diminished Men's most fascinating and exploratory material. Supreme case in point is the title track, an ominous orchestral overture in which the laws of gravity and sanity get undermined. "Lockout/Tagout" oozes out some subliminally eerie spy jazz, reminiscent of Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal's excellent '70s ECM recordings. The urgent, automaton cha-cha of "In Time" could've come straight from electronic-music pioneer Raymond Scott's lab, while "Nurse Hair Dub" puts that genre into an odd meter and immerses it in a threatening cauldron of ambience. "Excellent Cadavers" pits the stark post-rock dynamics of Can's "Mushroom" against the twinkling keyboards out of Bob James's "Nautilus." "Palm Sunday" uses rapid-fire bongo hits to evoke what a James Bond action sequence scored by Morricone might sound like. The CD closes in grand style with "Microphonic DST," a fucked-up waltz/jagged blues hybrid with distended guitar wails, and "The Freeze," which sounds like Morphine playing Miles Davis's Bitches Brew on a ship in choppy waters. Let's hope there are more such intriguing anomalies in Diminished Men's vaults.
-Dave segal.