Dawn of Midi's Eternal Return
The legendary experimental band on the making of their opus, 'Dysnomia,' and coming back to its obsessive rhythms 13 years later.
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.
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