I always admire bands who don’t just give you the same sound over and over again. And such an approach doesn’t require a radical reinvention of your sound or process every time you write a new piece. But it does mean that you have to be willing to push your own sonic boundaries.
What is so great about the new one from Deep Dive Species is that even with the brief amount of time I have spent exploring their music, I can clearly see that desire to evolve in action. “Salt and Water” might be built of similar sonic building blocks—chiming guitars, brooding bass lines, synth washes and digital beats—as its predecessor, “Adventus,” but the way they are arrayed and arranged, placed, and repurposed amounts to a whole different sound.
Whereas “Adventus,” my first taste of the music that Vadim Militsin and Sergey Popovich make under this name, played with cinematic soundscapes and more gothic urges, the otherworldly, and the echo of, perhaps, post-punk invention, the new one takes those same sonic building blocks and fashions something wholly different.
Here, the overall vibe is lighter, leaning more towards the jangle of the indie world than the shaded tones of the underground. Although instrumental in form, it feels more song-orientated than the soundscaping nature of what has gone before.
The lesson here should be evident to budding songwriters and soundscore composers. The sonic parts you need to build almost any sound or style, to work in any genre or tradition are already to be found all around you. The art is in using them to create something unique and engaging. And if you are still at a loss as to what that might sound like, play these two tracks from Deep Dive Species back to back, or explore and absorb their back catalogue in general, and keep doing so until the penny drops.
(If the penny never drops, give up music and find something else to do!)
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