Will To Be Well could be summarized like this: you take some ambient with a dark tint and add just a bit of idm and glitch all mixed with some really touchy keyboards and rough beats. But still this wouldn’t do justice to such a complex album filled with ideas that evolve around different but complementary states of mind.
Mark Dall manages to create something that has a unique feel to it. After quitting Young Hunting and started producing under the alias of Dalhous, nobody was sure what to expect from him. Releasing this album with his longtime collaborator Alex Ander was a bold move, due to the fact that everything that we knew about Young Hunting was lost in a time bubble and only the previous experience was kept and showcased with Will To Be Well.
Abandoning or even denouncing some of the industrial accents that his previous work had, he laid the foundation for something new that feels really mature from a creative point of view. Each sample, each beat, each chord that you hear is deeply immersive into R.D. Laing’s obsessive compulsive interest of mental illness.
The structure of the albums is set in such a way in which to deeply engulf you in the ideas expressed in sound-waves and some of these ideas can be quite disturbing and alarming depending on your general state of mind. The anatomy of this music piece is represented in a classic way of writing music with a prelude First Page From Justine, interlude Her Mind Was A Blank and postlude Masquerading As Love, each being an important and significant building block of the whole concept.
With every track you get sucked in deeper and your mind starts involving further and analyzing the diversity of moods you experience with each construct of sounds that hits the walls of your consciousness.
The first half gets mild variations on BPM misleadingly creating a sense of progression through the same idea, but it’s more like a catalog of scientific notes on micro cognitive processes belonging to the whole experience.
The second half becomes more thoughtful and the arrangements are carefully placed in the tracks in such a manner that exalts into something with a very cinematic feel. It’s like you’re part of a soundtrack for a really disturbing psychological thriller with high points and suspense and escalations keeping you tight to the edge of the chair.
Will To Be Well expands the known cluster phobic universe of electronic music, adding a compressed reinterpretation of multiple element that defined genres and artists. Dalhous could emerge into the light of massively consumed music, but in no case with works that touch profound levels of thought and immersion into the unknown of the human psyche.
Tracklist:
A1. First Page From JustineA2. A Communion With These People
A3. Function Curve
A4. Sensitised To This Area
B1. Lovers Of The Highlands
B2. Four Daughters By Four Women
B3. Her Mind Was A Blank
B4. Transference
C1. To Be Universal You Must Be Specific
C2. Someone Secure
C3. Entertain The Idea
D1. Abyssal Plane
D2. Thoughts Out Of Season
D3. DSM-III
D4. Masquerading As Love