Jordan Pedersen used to be able to draw Dexter – the boy genius not the serial killer – in under a minute.
The best music always has something to do with cartoons. That’s not really true, but LA record label Dome of Doom appears to have named themselves after an episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog, and that has to be a good sign.
They’ve put out their first official mixtape through VIA Publication, and it sounds like the work of someone who has every episode of Adventure Time on their laptop and also knows where to get the good peyote. It’s excellent.
I keep trying to come up with some buzzwords for the label’s sound, but I keep coming up empty: their sound seems united only by some vague sense of crate-digger mysticism. The mix doesn’t so much careen as it steers itself purposefully from dreamy found-sound to trance to a Ray Charles sample reduced to an arpeggiated, vaguely middle-eastern trill. The samples throughout are uniformly esoteric but, importantly, not forbiddingly so.
In other words, Dome of Doom’s world is a weird one, but it’s one they want to bring you into. I interviewed DoD artists rep – and DoD artist – Ahee at an event for VIA a few weeks back, and I asked him what he’d been working on lately. His first response was that he’d just cooked a massive vegan smorgasbord for the members of the collective he lives in.
That’s Dome of Doom: a big, weird buffet of stuff you’ve probably never seen before. But everyone’s invited, and it’ll all be delicious.
