After nearly five years of dormancy, revered Toronto tape label Craft Singles has re-emerged from the underground with a bruised treasure: a cassette edition of Enter Here (also available on digital format), the debut album of avant-garde noise outfit Désolee, a recording project formed in 2019 by Montreal’s Tad Ishikawa, a singer and multi-instrumentalist with a professed interest in the “sensorial pursuit of chaos.” Ishikawa and Josh Boguski (various instruments) stage this pursuit across eight tracks, moving between modes of reflection and expulsion while digging into the damp depths of human interiority.
Enter Here lands with a sense of clarity— perhaps surprising, as it’s a messy document of process, a record of marginalia and underlines. On “Asexual,” Ishikawa becomes a sort of inverted troubadour, crooning beneath the high-frequency tolling of electric guitar; the closing track “Plea To The Unspoken” opens with the sound of dropping coins before a mallet glides across a xylophone and frames a noisier, atonal tableau. For listeners invested in exploring the edges of sound, this record’s sonic range will thrill. But perhaps most exciting is how Désolee stages an intervention of form—how the record interrogates the formal assumptions of music and of ourselves. Ishikawa hurts and longs, but this music feels uninterested in catharsis or confession. Rather, Enter Here is a forward-looking and generative suggestion of possibility—a stylized apology, insides unbound.
