Aaron DILLOWAY
“No Skill Comedy Mind Reading”

Aaron Dilloway returns to Dais Records with ‘No Skill Comedy Mind Reading’, his first full-length album since 2017, a collection of characteristically jarring, absurdist material. Marked by his signature distortions and contortions — feedback-shrouded found sounds, field recordings, and vocal improvisations — ‘No Skill’ collects nearly a decade of select solo work and feels distinctly in the present, a scattered product of volatility, both harsh and humorous.

Few contemporary experimental artists over the past quarter-century are as prolific and revered as Dilloway, a pioneer of the American Midwest noise scene, a former member of Wolf Eyes, and the founder of the Oberlin-based label and record shop Hanson Records. But for wielding such an immense catalog, he has released only two proper solo LPs, amid a steadier output of tape releases and collaborative projects, with No Skill completing what has become an ambiguous album trilogy starting with his 2012 landmark ‘Modern Jester’.

“I almost feel like they’re kind of part of one piece. All three records are trying to find humor in the worst possible situations. Depending on who is listening and what their mindset is, they could be seen as funny or just horrifying, horrible records.” Half-serious, Dilloway continues, “This one to me, it’s the result of, you know, fucked up stuff: mental illness, medications, divorce, funny shit. Immersion into weird stuff always fascinates me in one way or another.”

Alongside the aforementioned inputs from the human experience, No Skill draws on several technical and aesthetic curiosities: the methodical sound design of Alvin Lucier, Andy Milligan’s low-budget 1989 cult horror film ‘The Weirdo’, and the pop eccentricity of film composer Hugo Montenegro. Dilloway came upon the latter’s oddball belongings through a storage-unit auction, which included notes from the composer’s early electronic experiments. Some of the album’s most unnerving moments, like the laughter that haunts “Bring Me The Head Of The Unknown Comic” — nodding sonically to avant-garde greats Nurse with Wound, and thematically to the paper bag-headed 1970s comedian — can be traced to the impact of this truly unusual find.

‘No Skill’ also follows recent artistic excursions: Dilloway’s realization of John Cage’s 88-tape loop ‘Rozart Mix’, his original score for ‘The Absence of Milk In The Mouths of the Lost’, collaborative albums with Lucrecia Dalt (‘Lucy & Aaron’), and Kim Gordon and Bill Nace (‘Body/Dilloway/Head’). While working on these and other projects, he kept a mental folder for his next Dais record, setting aside recordings that fit a fairly nebulous vision. “This record has kind of consumed my head since I finished ‘The Gag File’ [2017]. At first, I was thinking it would be more of a pop record, but then the Lucrecia project kind of got that out of my system. It started to flow more like my live sets.” He landed on a sequencing that keeps the listener slightly guessing, whether startled, amused, or confused; by design, the effect may lead one to think something is broken.

He opens the album in shrill screeches before diving into pockets of drone, created by two Nepali sarangi bows rubbed together, with the first emergence of his ogre-like vocal presence. Several minutes are then engulfed in white noise (“Forced Auctioneer”). Dilloway cites The Weirdo’s strange use of extended black space transitions and his lifelong love of tape hiss. He remembers getting cassettes from older kids, like the Misfits and Circle Jerks, and hearing the sounds as part of the songs, only to learn later that they were sonic artifacts left over from generations of tape dubbing. “I am into the idea of building all of these layers and turning them into something else. Like when I play live, things can get harsher than my recorded music, and for this, I wanted to get that feeling, for these blasts to be loud, but a bit more subdued. That complete static sound, almost like you’re underwater.”

Dilloway collects sound poetry records, and while he’s quick not to file what he does within the genre, the absurdity of the craft, using phonetic sounds and non-verbal noises to replace traditional semantic meaning, does speak through his work. On the B-side’s “Possession Audition Tape”, he reads and digitally cuts up various phrases from a book detailing a 1700s French religious group that was prone to public disruptions, creating his own convulsions of echoed stutters across the mix.

‘No Skill Comedy Mind Reading’ ends in a synth and organ rhythm machine piece derived from music he made for Pieter Schoolwerth and Phil Vanderhyden’s film ‘Supporting Actor’, in which an avatar of Dilloway gets pulled into a portal. There, he brushes shoulders with post-human creatures in a fantastical club. The scene, somehow transferable to audio, leaves the set in an appropriately disorienting dream state. A noise music luminary, a modern jester, dispatching from the unknown.