‘If Membership Is Slumber’ is not a record for the faint of heart. In fact, it’s a visionary experimental piece, one that pushes listeners to confront the radical flaws in human society. Spearheaded by American musicians and thinker AD Ozium, the record embraces a brooding and hypnotic sonic direction, weaving together folk, jazz and no wave into a structure-less continuum, an ambient-coded, ever-evolving mass of sound that develops a nocturne, smoky soundscape.
In it, we find Ozium’s melancholic spoken words, here resonating like a god narrating its latest lesson. Made up of two separate tracks, ‘Terrorgramophone’ and ‘Lifespring’, ‘If Membership is Slumber’ moves as a cohesive piece of art, a stream of consciousness that requires commitment and attention, but most of all the desire to venture into unexpected artistic places.
Drenched in an intricate, dystopian philosophical ethos, the cryptic lyricism behind ‘If Membership Is Slumber’ largely reflects the gloomy and decadent nature of its aural counterpart. We then discover AD Ozium as a bold thinker, now afraid to take on the idiosyncrasies of our modern world. As we are told: “The record delivers a stark, unflinching meditation on systemic dehumanisation, and the psychic toll of being cast outside the boundaries of belonging. This is not protest music in any traditional sense. It is something more interior, more corrosive: a document of what it feels like to exist within a structure that quietly, persistently denies your humanity.”
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