Hamish Black is no stranger to the night. While the rest of the world slept, he would only begin his day, navigating his way through cold evenings of a graveyard shift. A typical nightshift meant anything from looking at the artificial lighting of a rehab clinic ceiling, to hearing bellows of madness and anger within prison and psychiatric hospital walls.
Although Black does recall dealing with some dark subject matters on the job, he has found a way to pull inspiration from these low-spirited, transient spaces on his debut EP. “The mood that prevails is the consistency in my music. While there’s always a temptation to wallow in it, in the end I want my music to be the catharsis and the escape. It is about trying to make something of the dark and macabre,” commented Black.
Dissociate, the product of Black’s solo project, Graveyard Love, is an experimentation with robotics and machines played out with synths, samplers, ES-1s and MS-2000s. Taking his experiences of the night, Black creates a synth-heavy, dark pop soundtrack laden with enough creaks and 80’s horror puns to match Kavinsky’s Nightcall, or perhaps the next instalment of Drive. The urban crypts of the night, although seemingly desolate and evocative of the macabre (insanity, death, necromantic mythology, darkness), become less threatening and more thought-provoking. Black explores the night through fresh eyes, choosing to see the aesthetic qualities of unconventional spaces, the industrialised, the abandoned, and the unbeautiful.
