Some records ask for your attention, while others extend your comfort. AD Ozium’s ‘If Membership Is Slumber’ does neither. Instead, it lingers like a bad dream you cannot quite shake, unfolding as a deeply disorientating experience that seems less interested in entertaining us than confronting us with uncomfortable truths.
The Washington D.C.-based project, led by Jeremy Moore, operates in territory where genre labels quickly begin to lose their usefulness. Elements of folk music drift through the release like distant memories, only to be swallowed by abrasive textures, fractured rhythms and vast stretches of uneasy atmosphere. What emerges is something that feels simultaneously ancient and futuristic, intimate and alien.
Across its two tracks, ‘If Membership Is Slumber’ examines systems of exclusion and the psychological scars they leave behind. There is this sense of isolation, displacement and unease that is communicated through sound before words ever become necessary.
Opening track ‘Terrorgramophone’ feels like stumbling across a damaged transmission from another reality. Vocals emerge from the murk with an almost spectral quality, never fully revealing themselves, while the surrounding instrumentation twists and shifts beneath them. The song seems to exist in a state of constant tension, as though it is perpetually searching for solid ground it will never find.
While the instrumental ‘Lifespring’ offers a different but equally absorbing experience. Acoustic elements flicker briefly through the darkness before being overtaken by drones, dissonance and strange disturbances. It possesses a cinematic quality that creates environments and spaces for us inhabits rather than simply observe.
There are moments throughout ‘If Membership Is Slumber’ that recall the adventurous spirit of experimental artists who have long operated outside conventional songwriting structures. Yet AD Ozium’s approach is more about building his own unsettling architecture from familiar materials.
This is not easy listening, nor is it intended to be. ‘If Membership Is Slumber’ thrives in uncertainty, discomfort and contradiction. It asks us to sit with difficult emotions rather than escape them. And in an era where so much music is designed for immediate consumption, AD Ozium has created something far more demanding, and ultimately far more rewarding.