released January 22, 2021

Reviews:

“This isn’t long enough, Tony!” I scream at absolutely friggin’ nobody, and it’s just as well – nobody would understand what I’m talking about, let alone me in general. I’ll give you a little background: Tony Lien, purveyor of Bad Cake Records, is Dere Moans, and every release he blesses us with is a plunderphonic masterpiece. No, he’s not taking whole Blink-182 songs or whole Spice Girls songs and repurposing them for our referential pleasure. Whatever the heck he’s sampling, it ain’t something that I recognize, and that’s all the better – that means I can enjoy A Dereliction without the intrusion of outside influence.

But it’s too short.

Fine, so it’s technically an EP or whatever, big deal. And I say these things to completely praise Tony’s abilities, because I haven’t met a Dere Moans release I haven’t immensely liked. There’s really nobody that can rip through source material and come up with wildly inventive concoctions quite like Tony Lien, and here he straddles the line between complete cut-up sonic terrorism and a static-y sound puzzle that’s missing only a few pieces of frequency before it blooms into weird euphony. Listening to A Dereliction makes me wonder how in the living crap there hasn’t been a Dere Moans release on Orange Milk yet. It’s like someone’s taken a literal scissors to music here and reassembled it. That’s sort of the Orange Milk way.

But this is on Already Dead. Already Dead is so friggin’ awesome.

Look, there’s no way I’m not going to bombard your Twitter feed with “#BuyDereMoans” posts, because I’m halfway in the nuthouse here and A Dereliction is making more sense than most of what I encounter on a daily basis. And that’s fine – it’s a cracked mirror of abstract sound manipulation that has to be heard to be believed, and believed to be understood, and understood to be embraced, and embraced to be beloved, and beloved to be uploaded to Soulseek or whatever is on the internet now. Just kidding, buy a tape – #BuyDereMoans.

-Ryan Masteller (Cassette Gods)

"The pressure of sonic mayhem. Where is the threshold or the point the conscious begins to convulse? Is this earthquake in sound stretching across the aural landscape strong enough to cause structures to collapse? Or is this a waking moment for something bigger to come? a dereliction summons these thoughts. Rhythm and harmony have been broken to pieces then splayed out like aircraft parts in a warehouse for crash analysis. Eventually the waste is disposed of for scavengers to methodically collect. Amazingly Dere Moans is not a scavenger, this sonic congruence is built from thought, a bricolage of sound fueled by the disarray all things eventually revert to. With this ability, the creative source of sonic mass is equivalent to having an infinite supply of food and water. a dereliction can exist through time and beyond.

There are separate tracks on a dereliction, but this is hardly noticeable over a complete listen. Deep undertones are a hidden current in the opening track "theft of sky". Just like the sky is disintegrating from an asteroid explosion, tranquility lies a dozen fathoms down underwater. After listening though several times, its seems like Dere Moans use of samples is extremely limited. Sound segments are more created from raw sources like the mind itself, making a dereliction extremely unique and special. "headlamps in nightmares" is a good example of how high and low the dial can be adjusted in one track. A theme song for thoughts to drift into dreams then warp beyond dimensional reason. Clarity then sonic shrapnel, then the sub-conscious falling deeper into " channel.scab". Places where reality has no horizontal or vertical, all things adjusting to the slow turn of Dere Moans perception. The second to last track "emptied infinity" could be the most subdued, but this is only a resting place before the last and longest track "false optimus" initiates. A mind denting off and on blast of sonic pulsations until cracks become crevices and everything caves in for an aural overflow of energy."

-Lost In A Sea Of Sound