Doldrums: A Derelict Dance Freakout

Enlarge Ali Biddell

Doldrums' "Lost in My Head" is jam-packed with strange beats, voice manipulations and bouncy, colorful ideas.

Ali Biddell

Doldrums' "Lost in My Head" is jam-packed with strange beats, voice manipulations and bouncy, colorful ideas.

It's easy to take fast, instantly accessible, pretty-looking Internet for granted, but there was a time when only patient geeks and bored kids labored through dialing up their ISP for access, then spending minutes at a time waiting for single pages to load. Those most dedicated spirits unlocked unimaginable corridors of strangely styled information, and each of them heard the same establishing-connection modem noises before getting lost in a whirl of communication.

Doldrums opens "Lost in My Head" with those iconic noises, then proceeds to expose any listener curious enough to make it through the beeps to a low-fidelity, derelict dance freakout. It's jam-packed with voice manipulations, strange dance beats and other bouncy, colorful ideas — all from a skinny kid from Toronto named Airick Woodhead. As Doldrums, Woodhead creates the perfect soundtrack for surfing the Internet in his parents' basement at 3 a.m. in the '90s — though load speeds back then couldn't catch up to the song's tempo, the exhilaration felt after several hours of surfing in a daze is just as hectic as "Lost in My Head" sounds.

The song closes Empire Sounds, Doldrums' first EP, and shows as much exploratory promise as the Internet did back then. Here's hoping Doldrums 2.0 will also continue to develop and advance in quality, depth and style.