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LP
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DAK 020LP
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"Decimus' Evening Ragas Vol. 4 is Pat Muranos first solo guitar LP. Pat uses setting here both as accompaniment and foil. Side A opens with the outdoors and its accompanying sound and slowly over the course of the side, mirrors them back at us in a mutated form -- a photograph melting on the dashboard of a long-inert car. Strings mingle with crickets and become a pair of twins vocalizing, reminiscent, in a way, of a children's lullaby from Night of the Hunter. A plucked string becomes a glistening soap bubble that pops on the end of a branch. A palm muting strings becomes a storm front rolling in and dissipating just as it's noticed. The guitar obscures itself as it becomes cats and foxes communicating across empty fields. The natural world and the sound world meld into some winged thing -- cicadas giving way to delay, giving way to unknown things landing in fields while most of us sleep. I'm reminded more of 'recordists' like Anne McMillan and Knud Viktor than of other guitarists. I sense that Pat is steering and being steered throughout this record. A really true improvisation where any need for authorship kind of falls away and allows for a true sense of discovery and joy in the sounds being made. The B side also twists the familiar but in a different way. Instead of something being reflected back at us, sustained notes rise up, meet and coil around the sound of crickets. A new totality that tonally feels like a microscope placed on the artificial. Melodrama smooths out into morse code. Again music becomes nature, nature becomes music and they are both held there until something real and new emerges. Some kind of Steve Ditko cosmos unfolds into something that feels very modern and very old -- like a skipping media that creates a new world completely unintended or contained in the original piece. I find Pat's approach to be very inspiring and loose, true and unconcerned with anything but what the sounds themselves want." --Bill Nace Philadelphia 2024
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LP
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DAK 014LP
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Decimus: "New dimensions of silence, solitude, and isolation found us all in the spring of 2020. Herein lies a document of my own personal journey. Recorded outside and alone." Art by Alan Sherry at SIWA Prints.
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LP
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FUR 049LP
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How does one deal with the world's nightmarish montage of bad news -- the glut of information that incites feelings of futility and insanity? One way to cope is to plunge deeper into the madness, at least temporarily, for a dip into the healing pool of catharsis. Few people in music today provide a more immersive alternate reality on record to combat our own horrible one than Decimus (former No-Neck Blues Band guitarist and synth player Pat Murano). Musical categories dissolve in the mind as one tries to ascertain what's going on in Decimus's sonic universe, realized in a series of 12 LPs dedicated to the zodiac of Roman poet and rhetorician Decimius Magnus Ausonius (c. 310-c. 395). As with some of the most advanced and individualistic musicians (Coil, Demdike Stare, Mnemonists, Nurse with Wound), Murano instinctively generates sounds that seem to bypass normal listening responses and flow directly to the subconscious. Deep immersion in Decimus 7 leads the listener to a disturbing, mind-altering realm. Each aspect of these two epic, side-long pieces feels as if it's controlled by a malevolent super-being hell-bent on subverting conventional notions of music. The A-side's untitled track sounds like an alien transmission trying to fight through static and command the listener's soul. Grossly distorted Chrome-like grumbling and icy synth motifs waft over artfully spluttering drum-machine beats, establishing a disorienting, unsettling tone. With alchemical zeal, Murano fills the stereo field with perilous atmospheres, warped and distant melodies, Doppler-effected drones, and bleating percussion. When he brings in a trudging, sludgy 4/4 beat wreathed in mysterious mumbles and aural effluvia, it's like an unlikely collaboration between :zoviet*france: and Severed Heads. Side B's untitled piece starts with distant, bludgeoning beats hitting with unpredictable tempos and force. Four minutes in, a semi-familiar, bulbous rhythm coheres into a bizarre strain of slow-motion trance music, swathed from all directions with slithery, bleepy synth tones and machine-elf utterances geared to enhance your DMT trip. Things inevitably tilt toward chaos and return to the enigmatic static that opened the album. By record's end, you have no direction home... nor even a concept of what "home" is anymore. This may be the ultimate distillation of Decimus's chthonic genius. Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. Artwork by Chloe Harris.
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LP
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FUR 055LP
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2013 release. No-Neck Blues Band member Pat Murano's work as Decimus has been a prodigious endeavor to dissolve the ego and conventional notions of form from the creation of music. Decimus 10 continues Murano's rigorous yet freewheeling cavalcade of bizarre sound events that baffle and beguile in equal measure. The 21-minute A-side is a fungal, fractured, dream-fever soundtrack that makes the Italian horror-flick scores of Goblin sound like Danny Elfman hackwork. Seemingly recorded in the same infernal warehouse in which some of the stranger Smegma opuses were laid down, this piece leaves flaming shards of audio surrealism caroming around your uncomprehending brain. The 20-minute flipside begins like a minimal techno banger being smothered in its motherboard. Soon it morphs into a subtly horrifying hologram of ruptured ambience that will get Demdike Stare fans' knees a-tremblin'. In Decimus's transformative hands, gothic music comes off as something far more disturbing than its usual cartoonish pantomime. The track trundles to the finish line almost how it began, but with more striated squeals of unknown origin. You may want to sterilize your headphones after listening to it, because music this disturbing leaves enduring residue. Shapeshifting enigmatically with twisted inspiration, Decimus 10 radiates a nether-zonely beauty. Presented in screenprinted jacket. Mastered by Helmut Erler at Dubplates & Mastering.
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LP
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PLANAM 025LP
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"And lo, at the cusp of the portal
Infinity eclipses the senses
Seret!
Sartan!
The golden calf was gilded here."
2011 release. Planam presents another chapter in Pat Murano's solo project of abrasive atmospheric aggressions. Founding member of No Neck Blues Band, Murano also established the highly enigmatic K Salvatore duo in the mid-1990s together with Jason Meagher (also of NNCK fame and more recently head of the Black Dirt Studios) as well as the black Malkuth beast. Decimus has existed as an entity for some years, privately kept secret in the abyss of New York as its darkest creation. Available now in very limited quantities, Decimus 4 is the sixth chapter of the Decimus sodality, half-way through the complete endurance.
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DIGI 041LP
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Pat Murano's Decimus project has been all over the map in the past few years, undertaking a massive effort to put out a series of 12 albums in accordance with the zodiac of Decimus Magnus Ausonius. Previous to this, Murano was perhaps best-known as one of the founding members of No Neck Blues Band, K-Salvatore, and Malkuth, but it is with Decimus that the full story finally unfolds. With 11, Murano is going schizo and taking you down a hellish aural rabbit hole, deep into the abyss. Digitalis is not exaggerating when they say this might be the weirdest record they have ever put out. 11 opens with layers of looped, rusty-sounding strings mashed together with slowed down, death-rattle vocals. With buried crunch rhythms peeking out from the morass, the whole effect is like wandering through a funeral procession through a post-apocalyptic metropolis. Everything moves rapidly until it doesn't. Murano slows things to a crawl, pushing the demonic howl under a pane of glass. Blown-out minimal beats emerge to carry the bones along, but it feels like the worst is inevitable and there's no place to go but down. And that's when Murano pulls the rug out from beneath. Solemn guitar chords are plucked like feathers, mourning the loss of the sun but never losing faith entirely. Of course, that's just a tease because just as abruptly as it appears, the section is destroyed and replaced by sharp synth stabs and manipulated tribal death marches. Everything has a crunch to it. 11 sounds like an album that was found in a sandy tomb. It's simultaneously ancient and still looking forward. The whole album is so disorienting and disfigured that it's oddly beautiful. The thing about this installment in the Decimus saga is how much of a story it tells. Murano deftly jumps from one chapter to another, throwing so many ideas and styles into the cauldron and spitting out something that flows like magic. This is the soundtrack for modern times, in all its ugly glory. Cut to vinyl at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Artwork by Tiny Little Hammers.
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LP
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KEL 004LP
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"Oh bitter Heshvan!
Destroyer of the Kingdom of Solomon.
Noun hath brought downfall to your doorstep.
Metatron be your guide.
There is light in this darkness."
Dedicated to Rabbi Hiya. Dark psychedelia formulated by Pat Murano (No Neck Blues Band, Malkuth, K-Salvatore & Key of Shame) designed to alternately disorient and elate by synthetic means. Fifth in a series of 12 LPs dedicated to the zodiac of Decimus Magnus Ausonious." Limited edition of 300 with hand painted jackets.
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