Black Lodge & Jack Lever

Enso

Genre: ELECTRONIC

Cassette

Boomkat Product Review:

Supremely fugged-out improv for gong, drums, guitars, samples, and electronics from pivotal Manc and rumoured onetime member of Gescom, Black Lodge and his Stockport accomplice, Jack Lever (Kiyoko).

Dan Dwayre aka Black Lodge is the mutual spirit to Gescom, The Trilogy Tapes, Chloë Sevigny, Mo Wax and the NQ’s finest drinking holes. Don’t ask.

With fellow chthonic spirit Jack Lever, he recorded ‘Enso’ for Teesside’s Industrial Coast, supplying a keenly awaited follow-up to his Bitter Blood’ album with Disciples, and ‘MWR157’ (2018) for Warp’s Arcola sublabel, which itself was a long-awaited pressing, proper, of a thwarted Mo Wax release from 20 years ago. Aye, time moves different in Dan’s world, as with this half-hour tape, which feels at least twice as long due to its potent levels of wooze and hypnagogic oddness.

‘Enzo’ lands 20 years since Black Lodge’s debut for Mo Wax, the marvellously daft ‘Horse With No Name’, which was coincidentally among the first records this set of ears picked up in Vinyl Ex as a spotty teen splurging McD’s wages earned in Boro. In a very circuitous way, ‘Enso’ now ends up coming from a label in the same ’hood and the synchronicity is just personally fucking uncanny. Or is that the music? Yep it’s dead uncanny too; a slow, sozzled daydream of regression-session drones, muffled drums and reverberant gong magick that really sets it all apart.

Apparently captured in one unrehearsed take, it all flows out/inward simultaneously from the speaking-in-tongues glossolalia of the first part, thru Burroughsian dictaphone cut-up and Coil-esque folk-drone undressed of posh affectations on the A-side, while Dan’s decade spent with his huge gong is evident in the spectral ripples that open B-side’s ‘UK82’, and melt out into slopped ’n screwed psych on ‘777 - My Sad’, ultimately passing out and reaapearing in a dream with the gibber-jawed ‘Stella’. To be fair, this bout of Covid is possibly affecting my judgement here, but fuck me if this isn’t Black Lodge’s best gear, and kudos to Jack Lever for bringing it out of him. Trust, it’s one that rewards with repeat listens.

Cassette (2)