Dawn of Midi's Eternal Return

Over a decade on from its 2013 release, Dawn of Midi’s Dysnomia remains a one-of-a-kind album. The trio that made it has the instrumentation of a jazz ensemble: upright bassist Aakaash Israni, pianist Amino Belyamani, and drummer Qasim Naqvi. The band has a jazz background, and had released one earlier record of free improvisation, but they tacked hard in the opposite direction for Dysnomia, which consists of a single strictly composed piece of music based on the repetition and gradual development of complexly overlapping rhythms. The results sound something like cubist techno, like being sucked into the monochrome kaleidoscope on the album cover and spit out 45 minutes later. Or like getting a guided tour of the labyrinthine back rooms of time itself, a glimpse at the heaving machinery that makes it run. 

At any given time, each player might be doing something simple, perhaps just repeating a single note to a steady beat, or alternating between two or three notes. But each player’s steady beat is different: in the space that the bass plays three notes, say, the drums play four, and the piano plays five. And one player or another might in fact be playing to multiple different beats with each finger or hand at the same time, like an elaborate musical version of patting your head while rubbing your belly. Belyamani’s piano, in particular, often sounds like three or four different instruments in a geometric dance, thanks to an unusual technique that involves using one hand to play the keys while the other reaches inside the piano and manipulates its strings directly, evoking the sounds of bells, drums, or synthesizers. With all those simple repetitions layered on top of one another, the results become staggeringly intricate. 

If it sounds like Dysnomia is an intense, rigorous, cerebral album, music for closing your eyes and contemplating infinity—well, it is. But it’s also a lot of fun, almost deliriously so, once you get a feel for it. It’s structured like a DJ set, its individual tracks flowing one into the next with few perceptible breaks between them, and patient arcs of tension occasionally giving way to surging release. There’s an illustrative moment in “Ijiraq,” toward the end of the album. For a few minutes, the band sounds more or less like a skipping CD. It’s hard to hang on to any one beat; try to nod along and you might start looking like Jay-Z at the Coldplay show. Then, a single looped piano note enters the fray and rhythms that were previously teetering at the brink of chaos suddenly start to bounce and strut and wiggle, as if that one note were the key they needed to unlock their funky potential. 

Even in its more abstract passages, Dysnomia is so propulsive that it all but demands a physical response in its listener, even if it’s just walking around, or emulating Hova’s jerky nod. I swear, it doesn’t hit in quite the same way when you’re sitting still. The music’s guiding principle—the interaction of all those overlapping pulses—is known in Western music theory as polyrhythm. Trying to explain polyrhythm makes it sound like an intellectual exercise, and it is a sophisticated technique to be sure, but the musical effect is often more about hip-shaking than chin-scratching. Afro-disasporic dance music is full of polyrhythms. And though Dawn of Midi’s use of the technique can sound sui generis, its members are quick to credit the influence of music from West and North Africa. All three members played together in a West African Ewe ensemble while making Dysnomia, and Belyamani, who was born and raised in Morocco, grew up around Berber and Gnawa music there, and runs a tape label devoted to such Moroccan styles. “We’re all basically playing drums on our different instruments,” says Israni. “It’s a drum ensemble.”

Earlier this month, Dawn of Midi played Dysnomia in its entirety at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust as part of NYC Winter Jazzfest, their first hometown performance in about a decade. (The band started in New York and two of its members still live here; Israni now lives in California.) For me, and for others in the audience I’m sure, it was a long-awaited chance to see one of my favorite bands. Dysnomia was one of those epiphanic, life-changing records for me when it came out, but for whatever reason I never caught Dawn of Midi live at the time. The album was something of a phenomenon: There was a whole Radiolab episode about it, plus sold-out arena gigs opening for Radiohead. The trio toured heavily for years afterward, always playing Dysnomia note-for-note, but they never made another record, in part because the process of composing and rehearsing their opus was so all-consuming that they became wary of trying to repeat it. 

The touring stopped with the pandemic. Life went on for the three members. All of them have kids, and plenty of other musical projects; getting together to play now requires at least one cross-country flight. But over the last year, they started playing Dysnomia again at a handful of festivals around the world. Though it had been years since they’d navigated its challenging rhythms, it took them a single rehearsal to get reacquainted. (In addition to the immense musical sensitivity required, the piece’s repetitions are also challenging in a blunt physical way: after the Brooklyn show, Belyamani realized he’d burst a bunch of capillaries in one of his hands.) I interviewed all three of them after the Brooklyn show. I wanted to know what making Dysnomia had been like, and about the feeling of returning to a work that they’d once obsessed over, fought about, devoted hundreds of strenuous hours to perfecting, now that it’s no longer at the center of their lives.

Because Dysnomia has a dance element, but it also could hit you as being more cerebral, do you find that crowds react differently to it? Is it like, sometimes the crowd treats it like it’s techno and other times they treat it like it’s Steve Reich? 

Amino Belyamani: Yeah. It’s dependent on the venues. We’ve played fancy halls that have seats and balconies, and then we’ve played shows where it’s standing room and the soundsystem has Funktion-One subwoofers. We actually played at Cielo before it closed down, the famous house music club in the Meatpacking District, opening for Francois K, a legend of the house world. 

Aakaash Israni: I forgot about that gig. 

Belyamani: Obviously, in that setting, everybody’s dancing. But even in other venues, not necessarily even DJ-related, whenever there’s the big subwoofer, or one of those beefy German soundsystems, then people get it, and you see people moving. It’s still not as much as I would like them to dance, though. 

Israni: We played Berghain, too, the Kantine. It’s very context-dependent. Two of the festivals in the last year were classical-leaning. Sometimes we get invited to a jazz festival, like in New York just now, or a lot of times it’s a rock-oriented room. Wonderfruit in Thailand, which we just played, is like an artsy Burning Man type of thing. The music fits in lots of different places, which is cool for us, though I think we’ve always imagined it being more dancey than it really was. 

Funny story, we played Wilco’s festival years ago, Solid Sound, and it was a really good show, but weirdly they asked us to soundcheck during their set on an adjacent stage, which pissed off some Wilco fans. Nonetheless it was a very good show, very good crowd, and people were dancing more than usual. Years later, I got a call from two of the members of Big Thief—the show was before they were a well-known band, like 2015 or so—saying they were there and dancing their asses off. Which is just a funny thing because you don’t necessarily think of Big Thief as like, yeah we’re gonna go dance to African dance music. 

Qasim Naqvi: They invited us to open for them. 

Israni: Yeah, they wanted to do a tour together. Which is another thing that happens a lot. Musicians are fans of this record, but it’s less clear, with some of these bigger acts, whether their fans are fans of it. But the musicians are, which has led us to open for lots of big acts and maybe confuse their audiences a bit. 

While I was preparing my questions for this, I had some memory that you guys had opened for Radiohead, and I wanted to confirm it, so I googled “Dawn of Midi Radiohead,” and the first thing that came up was a 10-year-old thread on the Radiohead Subreddit called “Is Dawn of Midi the worst opening band you’ve ever seen?”

Israni: Yeah. Everyone’s like, “This is bullshit.” We got raked on the Reddit thread. There’s only one or two people being like, “No, no, this is sick.” 

Naqvi: We read it right before we went onstage [the second night of a two-night stand at Madison Square Garden] and it reinvigorated us. 

Did it feel like you were battling against the audience? 

Israni: It didn’t feel like that. Madison Square Garden is such a massive venue, so you don’t expect to captivate the whole room as the opener, unless you’re Gracie Abrams opening for Taylor Swift. And I think the people who came close to the stage were fans, so we had a decent experience with the crowd nearby. But yeah, the internet revealed that people were like, What is this bullshit? Which I guess is to be expected if you’re going to play music like this in front of 20,000 people. I don’t know if they were aware that the only reason we were on that stage is because Radiohead had asked us to be there.

It wasn’t like MSG booked you guys themselves. 

Israni: Yeah. My cousin owns it. 

When you were first working on Dysnomia, after having made a record of free improvised music, was there any trepidation about doing something so thoroughly different? What were those conversations like?

Israni: Look at Qasim. He’s grinning. 

Naqvi: Oh, yes. There were a lot of disagreements. 

Belyamani: We had to commit ourselves to rehearsing-slash-composing three times a week—each time, we would try out things in a rehearsal and go back and say, “Let’s scratch that, let’s keep that.” It was 150 rehearsals in a year. To get to that, there were of course disagreements, back and forth, until we all came to the same place philosophically. And then it was like, Now we have to execute this idea.

Israni: There was even a record in the middle of the two worlds, from when we were fighting about this new approach. Qasim is a passionate improviser, and a really good one, and he really didn’t want to let go of that aspect of what we were doing together. So as a compromise, we said, “We’ll work out the piano and bass stuff, and you do your thing, Qasim. Just play.” We recorded it in the Lower East Side somewhere, and then I went to Australia to mix it with this guy Richard Belkner, and I just woke up with this negative epiphany one night. I sat up in bed and was like, This is just not good. This isn’t a good enough record. And I told the guys this and they agreed, for whatever reason, to throw it in the trash, and we started over. And then we worked everything out, including the drums, and that became Dysnomia. 

Qasim and Amino, when you got that text or phone call or email that’s like “I want to throw out this record that we’ve been working on,” what were your reactions like to that? 

Naqvi: He called me. I remember that. Richard got you high with a joint and you listened to the final mix. 

Israni: He had strong weed on him all the time. 

Naqvi: You were really high, and you called me and were like, “Dude, I do not think we should put this out.” But there was no idea of what we should do next. We were all sort of OK with that for whatever reason. And it was only later that these guys figured out that with the drums, nothing is going to be improvised. And you’re not going to play cymbals. Which for me is the most outward facing aspect of my personality as a drummer. We’re going to take this away. It was very scary.

Israni: But we were all doing that to our instruments. We would take our instruments and reduce them spectrally to this very thin place, so that the interaction between them could become obvious. We wiped the slate of anything that would interfere with hearing this pointillism. Everyone is playing their instruments in such a reserved way. That’s why I wish we could play the concerts in the dark, because I don’t want people to look. I want people to listen. There’s nothing to look at. We’re not doing anything flashy. What’s flashy is the interaction of these three sounds. 

How did the actual composition of Dysnomia work? Were you improvising as a group and then developing on it, or was someone bringing in music and telling people what to do?

Belyamani: All of the above, basically. We tried everything: things that we would write on the spot; sometimes bringing in new stuff; sometimes we would just sit and listen to recordings of old rehearsals and go What were you doing there? What if you do that? We did a lot of trial and error. 

Israni: Sometimes we were straight lifting things from Ewe music of Ghana or Togo and then mixing it with things that we’d already been messing with in our own interest in polyrhythms. But there are some sections of the piece that are very literally things that might have been played on bells in Ewe pieces that we just orchestrated for our trio. Or in a section where we’re trying to build tension, I would play a polyrhythm like 3 against 5, and the Africans just don’t fuck with that rhythm. If you put 3 against 5 against some African stuff, suddenly it just builds a lot of tension. It’s those kinds of combinations. 

Amino is fluent in Moroccan stuff, and he knew these crazy Berber practices where you can be in 4 and 5 at the same time. And he would teach us how that works, and we would practice that for a long time. So it’s like, Ewe music, Berber-inspired music, and the aesthetic of the improvising trio that we already were. I think the quote is that originality is to the degree of the obscurity of your source material. And when you have very obscure source material, it’s easy to be creative with that. 

It’s very difficult music, and you guys committed huge amounts of time to composing and rehearsing it together. Was there a sense of devoting your lives, more or less, to making this crazy record? 

Israni: Yeah, kinda. 

Belyamani: Yeah. We were all poor in New York, committing this time instead of taking other gigs. It was a big commitment, big sacrifice, for sure. 

Israni: Also, there was a delusional belief that it could blow up. I thought that. 

Which turned out to be kind of true. 

Israni: That’s what’s so funny about the story. I remember thinking, We’re gonna play this at Madison Square Garden one day, years before it happened. And then it did, but what I didn’t see happening is that we’d still be in a weird niche that you can’t really make a living on. But I remember feeling so strongly that it was going to absolutely blow up. And it both did and did not. 

Naqvi: When we were at the garage at Madison Square Garden, pulling up and getting all the equipment out, you [Aakaash] just looked at me and you were like, “I’m going to shoot you in the face.” Because I was the one who went through the most severe adjustment as far as understanding the music and getting onboard. 

Israni: Without knowing the violent nature of our rhetoric, which is affectionate, that could come across as mean. Threatening Qasim’s life is one of the great pastimes that’s shared by all of us. 

Naqvi: There’s that scene in Point Break when Patrick Swayze rides the most bodacious wave. Aakaash wants that fate for me. He wants to take me surfing and for me to be swallowed by a shark. 

Israni: I grew up in California and I’m back here now. My background as a surfer, and the various creative ways that it could lead to either mine or Qasim’s demise, has been a longstanding trope in the band. 

I can’t help but feel like there’s something about riding the wave in the music, also. 

Israni: Yeah, it’s similar. Obviously these are cliches about surfing and music, but the reason these things transport individuals is that they lead you to the present. If you’re really having a good time at a show, whether you’re performing or in the audience, you’re present. You’re not in a verbal mental space, in your head, which is where we seem to spend most of our time. 

Is there anything strange to now be playing this music—music that’s so rigorous, and that was so demanding of your time and commitment when you were first developing it—in a way that it’s not the center of your life anymore? 

Naqvi: I find it to be a lot easier and more mellow. When we were touring the piece a lot, as Aakaash was saying earlier, there was this idea that we’re going to change the world with Dysnomia, and perhaps a certain pressure that we would put on ourselves as we performed. If there were miniscule mistakes, or things got slow—we would always have after-concert breakdowns of things that were working, things that weren’t working. Now we’re older and we have kids and have other responsibilities now. 

Israni: And it’s not so hard to play anymore. That takes the pressure off. That pressure was in the early days, when it was still hard for us. It’s a pleasure now, because we don’t do it hundreds of days a year. It’s fun that people care about it still, and you can show up and do this thing that you know only the three of you can do, and it means something to people. It’s more at ease and more pleasurable than when we were grinding harder. 

Naqvi: It’s kind of insane, when you think about it. It’s a really crazy piece of music. It’s very difficult and somehow we’ve just played it so many times that it’s just in the bone structure, fused into our memory. 

When we were chatting before the show, Qasim, you were drinking whiskey, and I was like, “Damn, this man can drink whiskey and then go up and play this piece?” It was very impressive. 

Belyamani: Not in the early days. 

Naqvi: In the early days, it was like Pulp Fiction. I was the gimp in the box. 

Israni: With the ball gag. 

Naqvi: Just drinking my Vitamin Water… I just had a few sips of that whiskey, actually. Usually, I never drink when we play that piece. 

Is there any feeling that you might make another record together? 

Israni: We live in different places, and to do music like this, you almost have to set aside a year to be together all the time. So it seems less practical now, especially given what we learned about the realities of the marketplace for music like this. I think you could eke out a living doing music like this if you were willing to be away 150 days a year. But it seems really hard. Remember years ago, when Grizzly Bear was at the height of their fame, they were putting out articles like, “We can’t make a living here”? If Grizzly Bear, the biggest indie band of that time in New York, is struggling, then how do other people do it? And this is far more esoteric than what they did. 

We have kids. How do you do something like this without having to be away all the time? Both to make the music and to make enough money. When you’re younger and more idealistic, you don’t think about it, but now you’re like, How does that work? I remember when we were at the height of the volume of our touring, and it was never enough. It was OK; you could kinda make a living, but not really. What is the marketplace appetite for this kind of thing? I’m still confused by that, even with the staying power of this record. 

Naqvi: When we started working on Dysnomia, we had just moved to New York, and we were all unemployed, and we had the time to rehearse four hours a day three or four days a week. So there’s that difficulty. But also, whatever new music we would make, it would need to be as good if not better than Dysnomia. I think we all agree on that, and that’s a very daunting thought. That record was made under very special, magical conditions, and I don’t know if they could be repeated. 

Belyamani: Aakaash mentioned the idealistic, pseudo-delusional state you’re in when you’re young. There’s something very interesting and important about that. I speak for myself but I assume my bandmates would agree: We’re not saying to people, Don’t ever do that. I would never undo that time. Who we are today is because of that, both as musicians and people. I would tell anyone who’s graduating college now: Go out and struggle. Be poor. If you get money, great. But if you’re struggling with your idea that you’re working on, and you’re like, “We’ll never make money off of that,” don’t let that stop you. 

Israni: I agree with that. You have to be crazy. You only have one life. It’s not just about money, obviously. You have to pursue the craziest thing that you think you can pull off. And who knows what comes of that? But interesting things do tend to come of it. What happened with Dysnomia, despite what I was talking about with the marketplace, was a very interesting result nonetheless.