We Speak Music
Peter Doran mines inner worlds with precision and poise with ‘All the World is Running on a Mystic Code’
There’s a moment on All the World is Running on a Mystic Code—somewhere in the middle of “Clockwork”—when the external world seems to fall away. The streets of Mullingar dissolve into metaphor, and we’re left with the unnerving weight of waiting. This isn’t new territory for Peter Doran, whose previous records have flirted with existential reflection, but here, he pushes further, crafting an album that feels like a whispered secret carried on wind.
Musically, the album walks a careful line between folk formalism and ambient experimentation. “Floodlights” is almost hymnal in its restraint, while “Steamboat Captain” feels like a fever dream from a forgotten sea voyage. These shifts are deliberate and effective; Doran uses space like another instrument, allowing songs to breathe and expand naturally.
At its core, the album is concerned with presence—being present during uncertainty, in grief, in love. The lyrics often toe the line between literal and allegorical: “God Bless the Now and Evermore” closes “Never Say Goodbye” with the cadence of an old prayer, but it’s also a challenge to live in the moment, even when that moment is unbearable.
If there’s a drawback, it’s that some tracks—particularly in the second half—dip into a uniformity of tone that could benefit from more risk. But this is a minor quibble in a work that’s otherwise cohesive and emotionally resonant.
Doran isn’t interested in spectacle. Instead, he gives us something much harder to come by: clarity. All the World is Running on a Mystic Code is a slow-burning, richly realized statement from an artist who has mastered the art of stillness.
Seattle’s ever-shifting musical landscape has long given rise to voices that thrive in the gray areas—between genres, between moods, between identities. Dan Powers, the artist behind Mutual Shock, adds a new entry into that canon with Nervous Systems, a debut album that operates as both sonic exorcism and sociocultural diagnosis. At its core, the record is a meditation on life under late capitalism—a terrain where dread, detachment, and digital blur are not just thematic textures, but everyday conditions.
Emerging from the shadowy emotional terrain explored on his 2024 EP Stimulus Progression, Powers takes his vision further here—not louder, but deeper. Nervous Systems doesn’t seek to overwhelm. Instead, it seeps in. It’s less an album you “hear” and more one you slowly inhabit, like a strange new architecture that reveals its structure room by room. The choice of analog synths and skeletal drum programming isn’t retro affectation; it’s a design choice rooted in feeling, in tension, in deliberate control.
Mutual Shock sits in conversation with a lineage of outsider electronic music—Drab Majesty’s theatrical alienation, Molchat Doma’s post-Soviet nostalgia, the mechanized introspection of Nine Inch Nails—but avoids being pinned down by any one aesthetic. Powers is less interested in genre homage than he is in emotional architecture. Each sound feels like a corridor leading somewhere disorienting yet familiar, like a half-remembered dream of an office building at night.
Thematically, the album is deeply of this moment. It’s about burnout, yes, but not in the way we meme it. It’s about the deeper erosion beneath the hustle: the spiritual confusion, the existential rootlessness, the constant digital hum that keeps us from ever fully arriving in our own lives. Powers channels these anxieties not with histrionics, but with careful understatement—letting the atmosphere do the heavy lifting. It’s as much sociology as it is art.
What makes Nervous Systems so vital is that it doesn’t offer escape. Instead, it offers recognition. In a time when much of culture aims to distract, Mutual Shock chooses to reflect. Powers holds a mirror to the disquiet and lets it speak—not with panic, but with precision. The result is an album that lingers long after the final note, not as a soundtrack to alienation, but as a language for it.
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