- The American artist reckons with grief and the long road to recovery on an LP fusing post-punk, ambient and IDM.
- "No artist is pleased… There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others," the American dancer Martha Graham once famously remarked.
After going 15 years without releasing solo material, this quote resonated with Dax Pierson. The Bay Area-based producer was a keyboardist for alternative hip-hop group Subtle when he was gravely injured in 2005. Following a show in Denver, the band's tour van skidded across a stretch of black ice on a highway in Iowa and flipped over. It might not have resulted in tragedy were it not for a faulty bench seat. As it was, Pierson was catapulted into the ceiling of the van, breaking his neck in the process. The accident left him partially paralyzed in all four limbs, in addition to his fingertips.
It took Pierson some two years following his injury to even lift his head up. He would embark on a long journey back to music-making, without the ability to use his previous hardware setup. These days, he's assembled an intricate web of software, primarily working on numerous iPads to control his laptop, as well as Ableton Live, which he refers to as "his religion."
Following any traumatic event, psychological pain can manifest itself physically in unexpected ways—perhaps as a stomach flutter, a headache, a suspicious pain in the lower back. Physical trauma, meanwhile, rarely comes without emotional distress. In this way, the human body is etched with these scars like a memorial, as physical and psychological pain regularly intertwine.
Pierson deals with the fallout of such events directly on Nerve Bumps (A Queer Divine Dissatisfaction). Previous versions of some of these tracks appeared on a live album, Live in Oakland, released back in 2019. The interlude "Snap" is taken from the poignant "A Snap Of The Neck," off the former record, where he murmurs in a gravelly voice, "Don't take your physical abilities for granted. For you can lose them—at the snap of the neck." "For The Angels," meanwhile, addresses the Bay Area scene's collective trauma, composed in remembrance of the late victims of the Ghost Ship fire.
Elements of Pierson's road to recovery are written across the album's track titles, and transmuted into what he terms "mid-fi" epiphanies. The twittering, upbeat melodies of '90s Autechre show their face on the loopy beats of "Keflex," a cut named after an antibiotic he used throughout his treatment. On "For 2_24," written in honor of the anniversary of his injury, somber notes trundle through ambient drones, but there are wisps of optimism in the traveling chords that lead the track out.
Pierson paints the landscape of emotions experienced in the near 20 years since his accident with apparent ease. The longest track on the album, "NTHING FKS U HRDR THN TM" (or "nothing fucks you harder than time"), is a sonic black hole that's easy to get lost in. It captures the vast and daunting nature of time that few are willing to confront—until it's too late.
The ethos of the album is best felt in the motivating synths that wobble—and occasionally teeter on the edge of melancholy—in the record's fourth track, "I Slay The Pain," a track meant to channel the power of autonomy. Since Pierson's injury, making music happens at a significantly slower pace, but he's kept at it with an admirable determination to archive his story as a Black, queer disabled person. "I felt like I had power to overcome these things that I have to go through on a daily basis," he explains. "I'm just going to slay the pain, and move on and make music."
Tracklist01. Adhesion
02. For The Angels
03. Snap
04. I Slay The Pain
05. Catch
06. Keflex
07. For 2_24
08. Nthng Fks U Hrdr Thn Tm