After amassing millions of streams online with lo-fi beats in the late 10s and early 20s, music producer Just Big Hills (alias of David Berman) felt the urge to pull away from the stream. As the years moved on and David moved to Amsterdam, he stepped over the frames of lo-fi hip hop music and instead went back to his roots of trip hop, electronica and guitar-driven music like indie rock and math rock. His work became more tension filled and melancholic, with layers of dissonance. The music’s themes started revolving around growth and maturity, feelings of hopelessness and human connections, as well as reconnecting with nature.
His debut album Senescence, released in 2023 on the British label College Music, is a culmination of these themes and a new start away from the confines of lo-fi music. The sound is best described as a love baby cyborg of Radiohead, Massive Attack and Boards of Canada. His new songs are not beats to study to, they are beats to study. And so, below follows an analysis of the album.
The term ‘senescence’ refers to the permanent arrest of the cell cycle in which cell division ceases, and is thus synonymous with the process of becoming old, of aging. The music on this project reflects the pains and beauties of such processes equally.
The dissonant chords in songs like Apathy and Brocken Spectre dissolve like dark fog clouds into gushing seas of blue, on which the nighttime sun sparkles. The struggle against every greater power trying to dim down freedom flowing is echoed in the reduxed drum patterns, boulders slamming into mountain slopes, assisted by arpeggios of rainbow colored hailstones.
The albums’ sixth and middle song is Liminality. It presents a longing called out by an as-yet undetermined force. The pulling and thrusting of ephemeral, sparkling piano lines, insistent bells, and singing synths add deep layers to the flanks. The word ‘liminality’ means “a quality of being in between two places or stages, on the verge of transitioning to something new”. An aesthetic has surfaced online in recent years that tries to capture this quality, this feeling, mostly through visual art. In music, the concept is also exquisitely explored in mk.gee’s 2024 album Two Star & The Dream Police. But now you know, Just Big Hills did it first. For a sci-fi short story in liminal outer space, see J.G. Ballard’s Report on an Unidentified Space Station.
Here, on Senescense, liminality is at the core. For every person, every natural phenomenon, every mountain even, and certainly for every song, momentariness, constant transition, is a raison d’être. With a little less than 2 minutes, Liminality is the shortest song on the album. Still, its lively guitar plucks with ominous bells on top leave a lasting impression and neatly make the album shift from the more earthly first half into the transcendental second.
The album reaches a climax soon after the start of that second half, with The Swarms’s sincere and sinister electronica (yes, sinful) being the ultimate facade before the burst of Apathy. The force that was yet undetermined in Liminality takes center stage here. The unkempt energy of Apathy obliterates the decor, carefully built so far, with every movement. It has compelling expression throughout, while maintaining convincing structure. The guitar strums at the peak of the song pierce through like a reckoning, each strum chopping off dead wood in its wide surroundings as well as its inner workings.
Wrestling With The Angel provides a magical, final post-climactic tension, with the boards of canada deliberating the inevitable but formidable landing in the sky. The nesting has begun. Flourish floats, stripped of the grit of earth, of withering pressure.
There is one highlight on the album that is not mentioned above. That is because it is best experienced in the context of its accompanying music video, without wordy introduction. One bit of foreshadowing: it ends in true sci-fi fashion.
Just last month, Just Big Hills released a new EP, Tape for Dream Lessons. A short journey through ambient soundscapes that take you by the hand with a warm, familiar grip.
Etienne Valk
Has a background in music, sociology, and law.
Editor at DigiCon (sci-fi section)
