Diskette Park – Radiant Covenant
Radiant Covenant
Diskette Park
Album
Signalwave
Liam Murphy
November 20, 2024
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November 20, 2024
Tracks in this feature
Tracks in this release
It is enticing and even fairly logical to associate effective atmosphere with the length of a track. In genres such as slushwave, ambient and dreamtone, drawn-out runtimes proliferate as artists pull us in over several or even dozens of minutes with slow-moving musical journeys. But shorter audio fragments can engage the listener in a very different way. Moreover, multiple fragments arranged well can elucidate a larger picture, a mosaic of different scenes or images. This sort of skilled tessellation happens in Diskette Park’s latest work, which brings together the montage style of popularised by Infinity Frequencies with new-age moments.
Radiant Covenant opens with what feels like an introductory shot, to use cinematic parlance. Prism’s narrow synth weaves its way in between heavy percussive sound and menacing bass, just for all these elements to be sucked back in and repeat in a loop of a few seconds. A far-reaching landscape appears as our sonic camera tracks slowly, again and again and again. A desolate land with a burgeoning energy, uncertain but special. Our window into this world is a mere glance, stuck on a loop. The following snippet, Rings, seems to show the same space bathed in the moonlight of a gentle cooing pad.
The release is enigmatic by design; the artwork and titles are ciphers to a deeper meaning. Diskette Park’s artwork is possibly as important as the music, a well-known glitch artist dealing in NFTs under the name N-LITE. Cloaked figures rest on rocks… added graphics giving an indication of a search for a deeper meaning, an exploration of a higher consciousness, a search for a divine power with which to form a covenant that will shine out in the desert space. So, are these short sharp journeys shards of this story?
The brevity of each instalment does not keep Diskette Park from delivering a multitude of visionary moments. The austere bass and piano of Sacrifice mark a moment of grave importance, only to be swept away by the glassy and searching Pointed. The track’s texture is a loop of enlivened sound. Darken finds our troop of new-age nomads marching deep into a jungle, whether that is the undergrowth in their faraway or a real climate is left to the listener’s interpretation.
Markedly peaceful tracks are peppered in between those that feel more cinematic. The steady dripping onto soft pads on Field. The enigmatic African instrumentation of Darken pulling the listener in.
The longest track on the album comes at the very end in the aptly-labelled Procession. A musky VHS recording of robed figures marches through the listener’s mind to a folky guitar sequence with the tightness and cordiality of a pagan dance ritual. This track breaks the usual channel-hop cut to fade out dramatically, almost assuring us that the abrupt style mid-album was wholly intentional.
Radiant Covenant seems to present short exultations to an unknowable power. Brief VHS clips of some new-age movement that lives on an unnamed island. Due to the snapshot-style that has proliferated in sub-genres like signalwave, inspired by Dilla-esque beatmaking, detail of the overarching concept is purposely vague. But in that strange space, haunting with gurgling textures and enticing melodies is where such a release thrives.
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