Crossing Bridges – Dreamcore OST
Dreamcore OST
Crossing Bridges
Album
Electronic
Liam Murphy
January 1, 2025
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Thornbury’s vibrant and inclusive Cafe Gummo opened with Three Mothers’ hard-hitting industrial sounds being unleashed upon the artsy venue. Patrons sat and stood unmoving as they took in her belligerent, glossy kicks she manipulated with careful, captivating precision.
Her androgynous voice cuts through wonky, vortexing synths, cementing her experimental melodies as oblique pop music. “No one told me life would be like this,” she repeated like a mantra; through her hyperactive auditory contortion, she defiantly paints the ebbing and flowing of life as a universal struggle.
Next on stage was prolific rapper Simo Soo, whose palette of punk, footwork, and vapor music coalesces into a singular noisy spectacle. Passionately owning the stage with solely a mic in hand, Soo put a hundred and ten percent into projecting their sticky verses atop their self-produced corrosive backdrops. They keep the hype ablaze by shouting out Dealers of God and playing the track Hot Mess (co-written with rap legend Lil B) live for the first time.
Then, the stars of the night, the elusive Dealers of God, each masked, entered Gummo’s doors and finally set foot on stage to Brian Eno-esque ambience, spraypainting their name on a blank sheet behind them to mark the bar as their territory. The ravenous crew proceed to spout their comedic raps entrancing the crowd for a solid hour.
The experimental electronic and hip-hop collective primarily comprises the quartet DJ Cheesewater, John City, Fuelgod and Lil Meatus, in addition to an extended family of mysterious, faceless members spanning the globe, particularly Australia and Sweden. Their labyrinthine GeoCities-inspired homepage glows with flashy typefaces and pop culture imagery, with as much to dig through as a point-and-click adventure game. Its psychedelic nature matches the drug-fuelled band’s music—collagey, trip-hop soundscapes evocative of Anticon’s cLOUDDEAD, produced by the Dealers’ own DJ Cheesewater, who records ambient post-rock as Panda Rosa.
The Dealers kill it as they power through songs from their three records, the audience lost in the enthrallingly jungly, hazy rap tunes as if they were the potent weed smoke the group praises so highly. Even the Dealers were wholly absorbed; Fuelgod cheekily hitting the nitrous on stage signals the crowd can loosen up – to put it lightly – block out the outside world and settle into the Dealers’ extraterrestrial consciousness wired to the nearest bong-fuelled pharmaceutical goods ready for pick-up. John City, their Swedish MC, eased the audience in with Back Through the East, perhaps the definitive encapsulation of what makes the Dealers of God themselves: post-ironic humour, cultural references to Melbourne’s north-eastern suburbs and a staggering amount of pop culture sampling.
The progressive, multipart suites Visions of Fuel and Alien Shaft are showstoppers that truly wow the crowd. The same goes for Tingo, a bonafide underground hit with full-fledged verses in the spirit of George Clanton’s chillwave revivalism. Despite the Dealers’ supposed sincerity, it’s in their nature to take the piss like any Aussie. Among their stage antics included City calling on people for equations during The Number Rap to trick them into thinking they got their calculations wrong. The Dealers then gifted signed Steve Jobs autobiographies to audience members – I was one of the lucky few chosen and was asked to open and read a random passage on request. The lines I read aloud were about how Jobs wanted Apple to be in his veins. Those words were met with rapturous applause, which was incredibly fitting for the Dealers’ spirit. The chaotic The Fucking of Michael interlude soundtracked the group slowly cutting and insistingly dishing out mud cake with a topper of Canadian politician John Baird to the audience.
Bringing everyone together for the closer was a reprise of Back Through the East, where they invited the audience to take over vocal duty. The “John City” chant that got everyone shouting along topped off the equally surreal and hilarious night. Few artists are as passionate as the Dealers of God, and witnessing their performance showed they’re all for community. The more (in the hotbox) the merrier...
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