SUAHN's 'Distort Everything Forever' Is a Ferocious, Freeing Debut of Hardware Bass Music
The best sentence anyone has written about Distort Everything Forever is the question Dylan Green opens his Bandcamp Daily review with: “What might the inside of a mind unoccupied and coming apart at the seams sound like?” Ten tracks later you have a reasonably detailed answer.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Built, per the record’s own notes, “with analog hardware, organic found sounds, and a deep appreciation for the history of electronic music” — and you can hear every one of those three things fighting for the same frequencies. Green’s description of the pressure is exact: “there’s a sense of raw power, barely contained and ready to decimate, at the center of all his songs.”
The Spatial Dynamics: The record’s trick is using degradation as an event rather than a coating. Green catches one: a “churning muted melody briefly gives way to static so deep I initially thought it was a bunch of change rattling in a bowl.” The effect, he writes, “sounds like zapping in and out of consciousness; maybe from overstimulation, perhaps from exhaustion, but disorienting and riveting regardless.” “Pressure” “groans and creaks like a cog in desperate need of some oil before the tinny programmed drums come skating by.”
Standout Performance
York himself, as a player rather than a programmer. His former life as a post-hardcore guitarist is audible in how these tracks are performed — dynamics shoved around by hand, distortion ridden rather than set and forgotten. Work began in 2020; an accident in 2023 that left him briefly housebound was, he has said, the catalyst to finish it. His own framing: “I wanted to make something that reflected my life, my anxieties, and what it felt like to be trapped inside my own brain.”
Why It’s Certified
Because it turns claustrophobia into architecture and then opens a window. On closer “Thaw,” Green writes, “a bed of fuzzy synths contracts and expands like you’ve been shot out of the airlocked bunker from Alien.” His final verdict earns the certification on its own: “this music sounds like freedom.”