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Avant-Garde: 1024756 - Dead Star Escape (2022)


65 / 100
A dense and dizzying journey into experimental and avant-garde territory, Dead Star Escape trades conventional structure for abstract textures and jazz-inflected grooves, shifting far from 1024756’s earlier hip-hop/soul leanings. Best suited for listeners who crave disorienting, free-form soundscapes rather than playlist-friendly tracks.
Dead Star Escape is yet another abstract single from Brisbane, Australia’s experimental/avant-garde project 1024756, even though neither genre tag appears on their Bandcamp page. Released on May 5, 2022, this track marks the artist’s second single.

Running for seven minutes, the song opens with the roar of machinery from a synth drifting in outer space, layered with the hum of alien waves. This slowly transforms into avant-garde rock territory, driven by drums and bass, with an array of keyboards and synths in a jazz-like manner, though notably without any trumpet and all at a laid-back tempo. The interlude slides into a groove with gliding piano touches, before being swallowed by noise until the end, leaving the track abstract and dizzying.

The difficulty in describing this song reflects the shallowness of my own knowledge of music, especially experimental and avant-garde but also proves 1024756’s success in scrambling my mind. This release is a significant shift from their earlier single, Powerlines, which leaned toward more typical hip-hop/soul territory.

Ultimately, Dead Star Escape isn’t something to debate over whether it belongs on a playlist — it simply doesn’t. Instead, it’s a piece destined for fans of experimental and avant-garde jazz.

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