Entering the Dirty Art Club is like letting an encyclopedic sample curator soundtrack a vibrant psychedelic cartoon dream. Conceived in North Carolina, fragments of sun-kissed soul and dusty psyche-rock sounds are stitched together and intertwined with live instrumentation recorded in a home studio setup to convey a woozy and soulful experience. It’s a blend that’s been refined on Dirty Art Club’s latest album, Basement Seance, which is themed around sampling rare “old songs and records that barely anybody’s heard” and reanimating them into a new life. Embracing a recording environment that usually involves sitting on the floor in a dark room, the Dirty Art Club production style is anchored around the technique of creating a sonic texture based on multiple sources: The fruits of vinyl digging trips are combined with layers of live instrumentation and embellished with field recordings and atmospheric effects. These component parts are skillfully mixed so that they “sound like one sample.” It’s a trick that creates a unity of sound where songs segue together while moving the emotional narrative along. This emotional resonance is what elevates Dirty Art Club’s music from being a simple hip-hop beat tape. It’s a feat made more remarkable by the fact that during the two year recording process of Basement Seance, its chief protagonist was overcoming a battle with the medical condition anhedonia as a symptom of a larger unspecified health issue. It left him temporarily “losing the innate feelings that govern how I identify with and perceive music.” This was after a lifetime of feeling “music-inspired emotion” more than any other source
