Dino DiMuro
Dino DiMuro’s MACHINE plays like a dusty reel-to-reel unearthed from a storage unit in Palm Springs. It’s warped in places, oddly preserved in others, and undeniably personal. A 16-track musical scrapbook, the album reads less like a polished studio effort and more like a lovingly assembled homage to the idiosyncrasies of vintage gear and the joys of tactile music-making. There’s a handmade, unpredictable charm here. It's an artist reveling in the tangibility of knobs, buttons, tape hiss, and character-rich gear that hums with its own life.
On “Elmwood's Irish Trip,” DiMuro leans into playful eccentricity. The track twists and turns through tempo changes and oddball grooves, like a one-man band being steered by subconscious impulse. It’s hard to tell where it’s going but that’s part of the point. “The Charming Man” slips into its own off-kilter universe, with drums that land somewhere between garage rock and warped exotica. The song builds and mutates in different ways.
“Makin’ Fun of Everyone” could easily be mistaken for a lost children's theme song until you listen closer. Underneath the sing-song delivery and zany FX is a biting, absurdist with some of which is inappropriate for young minds. The joke lands precisely because the delivery doesn’t. “Skip’s Aquarium,” with its fuzzy licks and lo-fi drum machines, plays like a love letter to the late ’60s but filtered through a sequencer and dipped in nostalgia. Then there’s “Night of the Living Martyr Statue,” a synth-laced mood piece that sounds like it wandered out of a VHS horror flick’s end credits, complete with Casio textures and a faint cinematic haze.
MACHINE is scrappy and strange, like flipping through a homemade cassette from someone with too many ideas and no interest in coherence. But that’s also where the magic is: it resists genre and resists polish. Instead, it invites you into DiMuro’s world. It’s a lo-fi funhouse of gear worship, absurdist humor, and nostalgic detours. The seams are visible, and that’s the beauty of it.