Dave Saved / NPLGNN (Forever Now)

Dave Saved / NPLGNN (Forever Now) From Italy’s restless post-rave pill-belly, Dave Saved and NPLGNN wretch up one side-a-piece of accreted and aggravated feels in the Eternal Flame tape on their new label; Forever Now. Imagine Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci… reminiscence smeared with The Automatics Group’s spectral trance and dance-pop processes, then filtered by KGB Man with a malfunctioning cassette deck, and you’ve almost got a grasp of this tape’s elusive, K-holing insight. Facing off two of the new Italian weird’s canniest operators, Eternal Flame finds Naples’ Dave Saved, known for his exploratory editions with Gang of Ducks, sharing a particularly wrecked headspace with NPLGNN - who was last spotted on his debut album Paesaggi Periferici for Reel Torque - in two side-long, mentalist tapestries approximating a fractal mosaic of warped, impressionistic experience that’s perhaps more relevant now than the real, original thing in itself. Parsing excavated samples and uploaded memories for glimpses of eyes-in-back-of-head escapism and club culture ephemera through differing approaches, they both present a series of picnoleptic flashbacks as an impressionistic mosaic of scrambled memories riddled with spiritual potential and framed by the moldy grout of existential dread - effectively revealing rave culture’s excesses and metaphysics in a sort of sickening negative relief. On the A-side Dave Saved digitally warps fragments of frothy dance-pop culture into a slow-fast flux of gurning, eyelid-flickering sound imagery straddling the line between lush and grotesque, stretching or condensing each fragment to the point of inevitable collapse or implosion; intensifying the sensation of euphoria until it makes you sick across 16 minutes of detached, OOBEy ephemera belied by a kind of “critical aggression”, as they put it.In the B-side, NPLGNN takes a different route to similar conclusions, noting an autographical, hauntological basis to the method of transforming his own material into a surreal fantazia of watery vocal residues and isolated moments of stunned-frozen, recursive rave stabs allowed to evaporate, along with your mind, out into the ether (infinite smoke machines, eternally dilated strobes) with a proper nightmare/dream quality.If you ask us, it’s the best material in either artist’s expanding oeuvre, and comes highly recommended to any listeners empathetic with Lee Gamble, Dale Cornish’s Ulex, The Automatics Group, Lorenzo Senni, or Teresa Winter’s most extreme, thizzed-out aspects. in boomkat