Deckard Croix Challenges Perception with Surreal Sonic Alchemy on “Lens of Interior Design”
You don’t listen to Deckard Croix’s “Lens of Interior Design” so much as you surrender to it. It doesn’t ask for your attention — it demands your disorientation. A serpentine and cerebral slice of progressive electronic psychedelia, the new single from the Columbus-based experimentalist is the latest offering from a prolific career marked by defiant nonconformity, analog grit, and a restless desire to deconstruct rather than please.
Clocking in at just under five minutes, “Lens of Interior Design” is anything but accessible in the mainstream sense — and that’s the point. Like free jazz or the more arcane branches of musique concrète, this is music for the few, not the many. But for those brave enough to peer through Croix’s fractured kaleidoscope, the rewards are visceral. Imagine Eno jamming with Can at 3 a.m. in a Berlin warehouse, while a beat poet mutters into a vocoder about postmodern malaise. Then smear it with lo-fi varnish and lace it with just enough lyrical ambiguity to leave your spine tingling.
“All the bountiful winters,” Croix chants — or is it laments? — in a voice soaked in tape hiss and existential fatigue. The lyrics function more like abstract brushstrokes than narrative devices: “Arrhythmic in the heart, neurotic in the dark,” he intones, over shifting textures of spectral synths and angular fretwork. It’s a language born of tension and reinterpretation, more surrealist manifesto than traditional verse.
As always, Croix is a one-man band of madcap vision — handling everything from instrumentation to engineering. The drums, originally laid down by Hisham and sampled into Croix’s production matrix, pulse with a mechanical heartbeat that gives the song a disjointed groove. The mix is hazy and immersive, full of sonic ghost trails and tape-saturated warmth, conjuring a dreamscape where meaning slips through your fingers like smoke.
Much like his earlier projects — from the epic Sardinian homage Bocca di Leone to the minimalist heartbreak of Splendour + Misery — “Lens of Interior Design” thrives in ambiguity. Croix’s work exists in a liminal zone between music, sound art, and sonic psychogeography. You’re not meant to dance to this; you’re meant to question it.
The single is a preview of an as-yet-untitled LP due this autumn, which promises to further Croix’s signature blend of psychedelia, ambient abstraction, and philosophical unease. If this track is any indication, that album will be another compelling entry in an oeuvre that refuses to sit still, let alone sell out.
For the casual listener, this may be a confounding, even alienating experience. But for those with ears tuned to the outer edges of what music can be — “Lens of Interior Design” is not just a song. It’s a sonic thesis, a mood poem, a dare.
Croix doesn’t care if you get it. But if you do, you’ll never forget it.
https://www.deckardcroix.com
