Album Premiere: Mindmap of a Madman – Dull Fantastique (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

With thirty-five songs ranging from one and a half to over eight minutes. Mindmap of a Madman feels less like an album in the usual sense and more like a collection of fragments and sonic sketches, ideas and imaginings, especially given how faint and fractured, spacious and atmospheric many of the tracks are.

But then, nothing to do with Dull Fantastique is conformist or conventional; the back story of the artist is of an alien come to Earth on a cosmic exchange scheme, the album his thoughts and feelings as a sort of sonic diary entry…like a Ziggy Stardust for a new, and even weirder, generation.

And while there are pieces that come close to the expected song format, such as the delicate “skeleton,” and even that seems to phase in and out of existence as if it is perhaps being beamed in from another dimension, most of the songs found here are more “out there.” But rather than just playing the “weird for the sake of it”, here there is a beauty in the strangeness, a deftness to the swooning cinematics, a fragility and vulnerability in the sonics.

“same place” is a long and languid voyage through ambient soundscapes and liminal electronic drifts, “this is less” is a psych-freak-folk echo floating past on solar winds, “It Will Be Nothing But Brief” – ironically one of the longer tracks found here – is a delicate musical meditation and “madness aurifical” is a half spoken word, half sung piece that sounds like the sort of thing you might have found William Shatner involved in during the height of his seventies post-trekkie fame.

Mindmap of a Madman is not an album that fits well with the traditional review-writing process. It is something that only starts to make sense when personally experienced and in its entirety. Merely describing the sounds here is less than half the story; listening to snapshots and selected tracks and trying to explain them in mere words doesn’t really work, and all the humble scribbler can do is try to intrigue, entice, and draw the listener in.

Hopefully, I have done at least that much, because this is an album that you should immerse yourself in, and do so many times.

Website
Facebook
Instagram
Spotify