Now on his fourth album under the moniker, DUGHPA is another creative guise of prolific madman Wagner Odegard, renown among freaks and underground dwellers for WULKANAZ and his selfsame solo work as well as TOMHET, MAUVET MAUVE, and FELON WIND among others. While half of Wagner's expressions belong to black metal and the other half to ambient, there's varying degrees with the latter to which he casts his ever-restless gaze. Among them, DUGPHA is undeniably the most cosmic - or kosmische, the hypnotic synth-based variant of krautrock as per classic Tangerine Dream, Cluster, and Harmonia or the early solo works of Klaus Schulze, Roedelius, and Vangelis. To date, DUGHPA's three albums - in numerical order, released in 2016, 2018, and 2020 - have tended toward the rawer side of kosmische, no doubt a symptom of Wagner's long-standing immersion in black metal. Still, no matter how much darkness covered those DUGHPA albums, an overarching sense of wonder or at least magnitude guided them, and his aesthetic's arguably reached its apotheosis with 4. Whereas the preceding III proved Wagner could kinda clean up his act, 4 shimmers and sizzles with the man's best-sounding recording yet; everything here simply sounds 3D and, more than ever, not of this earthly plane. Credit is also due to the songwriting, which largely sticks to the same tack, but on 4 does Wagner make his compositions more involving or at least more layered: the album's stunningly cinematic, and far more complex than the usual underground-accepted practice of simple loops and programming. DUGHPA will take you to the far ends of the cosmos with 4, and there's no coming back...
