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Category: Music
To enter the home of avant-garde veteran Dewey Mahood is to walk into a kind of domestic bliss that is distinctly Southeast Portland: In the basement, he and his girlfriend, Loni, have two separate workstations; she for her clothing design business, he a makeshift recording studio. It was down here, in the winter months of 2008, that Mahood created Dawn of the Golden Eternity, a hazy, blissful, almost entirely improvised album set to be released under his solo moniker, Plankton Wat. While his still ongoing band projects, also mostly improvised, tend toward the loud and aggressive, this is the product of a different frame of mind, one that’s closer to his reality as a father: He would usually record after putting his 7-year-old daughter, Harper, to sleep. “This is more of a late-night, I’m getting tired, I’m getting ready for bed, so I’ll record for a while [kind of thing],” he says, “once the energy is going down a bit.” Indeed, Dawn of the Golden Eternity is a record that feels born after-hours. Its 10 tracks, a melding of various instruments including guitar, banjo, African thumb piano, harmonium and at least one flute solo from Harper, coalesce into a heavenly, temple-massaging drone. Sonically, it is a far cry from the sound of his other groups—the revivalist ’80s hardcore of Bloodbiker and the distorted krautrock of Eternal Tapestry—but philosophically, it keeps with what Mahood has been doing since he moved to Portland from Northern California in the early ’90s. “I was just doing pretty much all experimental, improv-type stuff, which has a good following now, but back then it was the smallest group of people,” the 38-year-old says. “Most people just did it at their houses. No venue would really have you.” Of course, things change. And for somebody who has been messing with sound as long as Mahood, it’s a welcome shift. “When I first started doing this and giving people tapes, I’d always get a funny reaction from people. They’d just be like, ‘What is this?’” he says. “Now it seems people are a lot more excited about it.”
Matthew Singer/Willamette Week
2:35 AM
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