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Dolores Mondo Stash has been around since 2017 and it is the solo project of Romanian artist Dan Tecucianu. Since the beginning, Dolores Mondo Stash was a vessel for sound experimentation, from different recording techniques to different styles and influences; from industrial, noise to no-wave, psychedelic and ambient.

'Folklore of Despair' is a six track album, built from decaying, surreal tape loop sounds and atmospheric synth-scapes. The surroundings of this album are organic and dream-like, they want to set the listener in an intimate, yet unrecognisable and uneasy state of mind. The tape loops juggle with the idea of recurrence, as well as, with the deconstruction of melancholia, breaking it into bits of memories that can never be re-shaped...and now imagine all these thrown over a naive fauna landscape of ambient synths, maybe a nightmare at times, or maybe dashes of places you've never visited.

"We’re in eerie electronics territory here. Haunting, creepy. Suspenseful. There’s something of a vintage sci-fi feel to this nightmarish trip, as gurgles and scrapes bibble up through swamps of whistling organ-like drones. It’s a dark record, but not because it relies on heavy drones, low, rumbling, doomy bass, hard volume or distortion: Folklore Of Despair worms its way into the psyche, prodding and poking stealthily into the recesses of the subconscious, gently rubbing and scratching at those small, nagging uncertainties that stem from the fear of the unknown. Whistles and bleeps intermingle with tense violin-type drones and quibbling analogue sounds, spooky, spectral notes and crashing crunches which disrupt the flow and create a different kind of tension, one that feels like things are going out of control and colliding on every side, a catastrophic nightmare where carks skid into one another as every third driver find their steering no longer works or their brakes have been cut. It’s disorientating, and the effect is so strong because everything about the album is so unpredictable.

There are no conventional structures here, or even any clear structures at all. Like the best suspense movies, the unexpected always occurs unexpectedly. The tense build-ups are often false markers, but then again, there’s not much letup in the tension, which they sustain and sustain, and your nerves are jangling because your gut tells you ‘something isn’t right’.

Things get really weird really fast: second track ‘Darkness is Driving the Machine of Debauchery’ is quite headfuck, as glitches and warping sounding like a stretched and buckled tape struggling to traverse over the heads. It squeaks and squeals and sounds as if whatever was recorded on the tape before is bleeding through, like voices from the other side – I’m reminded tangentially of the 7” containing sample recordings of voices from the ether that accompany Konstantin Raudive’s 1971 book, Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead (something that would feed into the theories expounded by William Burroughs on the tape experiments he conducted withy Brion Gysin).

An actual voice, murky, muffled, drifts, disembodied and strange through the creeping chords on ‘If the Forest Ate the Trees’, where the notes drift like fog, but there’s more to its being unsettling than that: there’s an otherness, a strangeness you can’t quite put your finger on, as if maybe the drifting fog in the graveyard scene has been filmed in reverse. It’s the fact it’s difficult to pinpoint that heightens the effect so.

Thunderous beats – distant, as if playing in a club three blocks away – pulse, deep, and bassy, on ‘Floral Patterned Gearshift’, and the sound is all but drowned out by the shrill, clamorous shrieking synapse-shattering tweets that flurry like a swarm of bats scurrying and flurrying. You have to fight the impulse to duck to avoid the aural assailants, invisible yet somehow tangible in the mind’s eye.

At times, everything simply collapses into chaotic cacophony. It’s hard to process, and ever harder to digest. Folklore Of Despair is a complex and uncomfortable album, which is nothing the title hints it may be. I’m not even entirely certain what it is, but it leaves you feeling jittery, jumpy and on edge." Aural Aggravation auralaggravation.com/2021/05/31/dolores-mondo-stash-folklore-of-despair/?fbclid=IwAR19XRsLqsqfDYrLZkDn3_LrT82KEManpHhe2SVH3VjihPXAf6A59s8TPA4

"Folklore of Despair’ sounds like it could be the title of a famous anthropological text, something French and impenetrable from the 1950s, say – a text more written about than read – a report to the academy, dispassionate and objective, probing a lost culture’s manifold attempts to reach an accord with death and decay.

Dan Tecucianu, a.k.a. the mysterious Dolores Mondo Stash, describes the project (out this Friday on tape and download from the inestimable Cruel Nature Records) as a process of deconstruction and recurrence. Recorded at his apartment in Bucharest, Romania, over December and January, Tecucianu composed the music for it out of looped fragments he improvised on different instruments. Out of tune, unsettling and darkly cartoonish, the results move with an ungainly mechanical life.

‘For me,’ says Tecucianu, ‘the deconstruction of melancholia is similar to a dream – a collage of personal themes and probably collective memories, deconstructed and arranged in a disturbing way.’

Cut from whatever original context they were born in and reconstituted in new iterations, these fragments are possessed by the absurd, acrobatic quality of a Svankmeyer film or even (at a push) an alien echo of Tom Waits in his devil’s ringmaster period, the layers of looping scales and swooshing chords making sentimental or nostalgic motifs neurotic through careful repetition.

So, in the opening track, ‘Grapes and Coagulated Nightmares’, a synth-scape of flute-like chirrups and bursts of static is intermittently broken by tremulous strings. Titles like ‘Darkness is Driving the Machine of Debauchery’ and ‘Floral Patterned Gearshift’ convey an idea of the weird mixture of the robotic and the organic at work throughout this album, and while it’s an undoubtedly unnerving listen, there’s something playful at work, even conversational.

In his enquiries into melancholia and memory, Tecucianu has found, ‘that some bits can never be reshaped, but that doesn’t mean you can’t give them new form’. He makes it sound so easy." Colin Bond, God Is In The TV www.godisinthetvzine.co.uk/2021/06/07/exclusive-dolores-mondo-stash-folklore-of-despair-video-and-album-stream/