Gang Gang Dance

Gang Gang Dance is from New York and utilizes female vocals, guitars, drums, bass, piano, synthesizers, percussion, and digital editing. The quartet's latest release, God's Money, consists of two incessantly mutating, seamlessly shape-shifting sound collages, which feel as if they were actually beamed from GGD's collective mind straight into my head. I say such an odd thing because this music moves, unfolds, and evolves in ways indicative of the realm of the imagination, not the physical world; nothing is as it seems, and everything changes all the time. Rhythms are inspired by foreign styles (African ceremonial music, Middle Eastern grooves, Jamaican dub, etc.), but every time these influences become too obvious, the rhythms then atomically reconfigure into coolly rippling machine-generated ambient feedback. Liz Bougatsos' exotic chirps and chants multiply, becoming many voices only to shatter into dozens of tiny, electronic fragments. What at one moment totally felt like a group of humans jamming now marches on as ONE, entertaining the possibility that this entire disc is actually a computer-produced composition, and GGD is nothing more than a bunch of digital avatars, hallucinations. It's such a beautifully constructed dream that I fully endorse losing yourself in it.