Cornish, Dale

Cornish, Dale

Altruism

The Death Of Rave

The Death of Rave come off life support with a definitive new full length by original rave deconstructionist and observant storyteller Dale Cornish, reflecting on the experience of gender-affirming surgery and the way people treat each other over ruggedly skewed dance music and bittersweet ballads crooned in pure Cronx tongue. It’s fully out-there, but a big big RIYL aya, HTRK, Leslie Winer, CoH, Pan Sonic.One of the UK’s most fascinating DIY figures, Dale Cornish’s catalogue spans wry electroclash with No Bra, thru to Baraclough (aka the “Gay Whitehouse”) in the naughts, and then a notable streak of LPs in the 2010s that drily, playfully sowed the seeds for deconstructed club musics. In this decade, Dale strikingly found his voice on ‘Thug Ambient’ (2020) and the brilliant ‘Traditional Music of South London’ (2022), with the latter betraying a maturity of songwriting and displaced drum programming that finely braided his binds with the avant garde, ‘90s alt.rock and leading-edge queer club culture in a properly distinctive style.Dale’s 2nd album for TDoR ‘Altruism’ now sees him further come into his own with 14 songs that sweat the small and big stuff - romance, friendship, capriciousness, and the process of transforming into “the body you deserve, the body of your dreams” (salute, HTRK!). On one level the album can be heard to chime with the times’ phase-shift to literal and upfront honesty, whilst on another it is offset with a rudely witted, pleasure-seeking palate of brute and sensory electronic pulses and tones, as rooted...

Cornish, Dale

Cut Sleeve

Halcyon Veil

London’s avant prism-pusher Dale Cornish debuts for Rabit’s Halcyon Veil imprint with an acute distillation of pointillist rhythms, stark noise and contemporary politics in the barbed bouquet of Cut Sleeve, following a multi-pronged attack on 2016 which saw him issue singles with Where To Now? and The Wormhole, plus a remix of Billie Ray Martin and a guest vocal on Powell’s Sport album.  Stripped to the barest truth of biting drums and his own vocals rent within acres of negative space, when compared with his run of solo aces for Entr’acte and The Wormhole, the six tracks of Cut Sleeve conversely amount to some of the most corporeal works in Cornish’s solo catalogue whilst serving to neatly intersect the Halcyon Veil aesthetic from both mutual and personally developed perspectives.   Dale wears his politics explicitly and suggestively on Cut Sleeve. Starting with the nagging reminder that “in 2016 it is illegal to be gay in approximately 75 nations and regions around the world” delivered in acrid noise and a slurred tone that makes sure the message rings out slowly and uncomfortably, the session presents in reductionist take on UK and US club music in brittle, certain, and uniquely, drily f*nked-up terms, taking on skeletal steppers templates in Cut and chasmic darkness on LW or Vauxhall, before feeding his own, bestial vocals back into the mix with a blend of glossolalic deviance, cryptic poetry and stoic funk in Emperor Ai.