Crucial Track for January 23, 2026

"Ijiraq" by Dawn of Midi

#365songs (23 / 365)

In honor of today's article on independent music writing website Hearing Things, an interview with Dawn of Midi, who have not released an album since Dysnomia in 2013 (!) but have apparently been performing again in recent years. What they have been performing is Dysnomia in its entirety. I find it hard to write about any song without putting it in the context of the album on which it appears, as you may have noticed if you're reading these, but Dysnomia in particular is really just one single piece with "track" divisions that feel pretty arbitrary.

Still, though, this is #365songs, not #365albums, so I'm picking the track, "Ijiraq," that has my single favorite moment on Dysnomia. It happens at about 3:45, and it is also the single moment that the Hearing Things article linked above describes in detail:

> For a few minutes, the band sounds more or less like a skipping CD. It’s hard to hang on to any one beat; try to nod along and you might start looking like Jay-Z at the Coldplay show. Then, a single looped piano note enters the fray and rhythms that were previously teetering at the brink of chaos suddenly start to bounce and strut and wiggle, as if that one note were the key they needed to unlock their funky potential.

I myself called that precise moment out in my micro-review of this album on Bandcamp. I referred to it as a "drop," and I did and do still find it as thrilling as any dubstep drop I've ever heard (admittedly, I haven't heard that many). All the playing on Dysnomia is astonishingly tight but the way "Ijiraq" goes from chaotic to totally locked in at that moment is beautiful. And I don't know if it was intentional but in the studio recording there's a slight clatter of drumsticks or something just prior, as if to remind you that the intricate rhythmic counterpoint you're hearing is not computer-generated (contra the band name) but the product of people hitting and plucking instruments in a room.