Celebrating’s “Dance Music” turns breakbeats, tape hiss, and dissociation into something harder to name
Celebrating push further out on “Dance Music,” a debut EP built from violence, nostalgia, and fabricated memory
Indianapolis solo project Celebrating follows “Demo 2025” with a debut EP that treats genre like a loose suggestion
Atticus Mitchell talks about Celebrating less like a fixed band than a way to deal with feelings that refuse to come out cleanly. “I lack the proper words, friend” sits under the project’s name online, and “Dance Music” makes that feel less like a slogan than a working method.
There is a reason the old gear matters. “This is why I master using a 4 track tape recorder and use old reverbs and synths,” he says. “I’m fabricating an environment!”
That invented environment has a lot to do with time. Mitchell describes himself as deeply sensitive to both violence and nostalgia, and says those feelings have only sharpened as he gets older. “I’m almost eighteen now, and I can’t help but feel that it will be harder for me to properly convey what I understand the more I observe,” he says. “It is very hard to be a pacifist in this world; I want to show love to everyone, but the media, my government, even human nature itself feels like it runs on misanthropy and selfishness sometimes. All I want is peace and love: Two things I believe we all deserve, though it almost sounds naive.”
That tension sits right in the middle of the record. “Two Leeches” and “I Watched Fruit Change into Plastic” lean into anger, disgust, and the sick feeling of watching greed and abuse keep renewing themselves. The opening track is all mutual damage and locked jaws, a cycle of dependence and punishment with no release except collapse. “I Watched Fruit Change into Plastic” is even colder. Its central image — “You are a garden of fake fruit and plastic flowers” — lands like a sentence already passed.
The other half of the EP moves differently. “Eating for Sport” and “The Woods” both circle nostalgia, but not in the same way. One reaches for comfort and misses it. The other lets the unease stay in the room. Mitchell calls them “two sides of the same coin: a certain nostalgia I wish I could properly explain in words. One side comforting, the other side distressing.” “Eating for Sport” turns that uncertainty into fragments — “June-bug, metamorphosis,” “I’d hate to be an echo only you can hear,” “one more moment, one more piece, one more time, then I’ll sleep” — while “The Woods” stretches out for nearly eight minutes and reduces itself to a single line: “I see clouds over the woods.”
Celebrating started last April, when Mitchell began having dissociative episodes tied to a longing for a place and time he never actually lived through: “an idolized, fabricated version of the late 1990’s.” Sometimes those episodes came three or four times a week, sometimes pleasant, sometimes not. “At its worst, sometimes I would wake up in the morning and I would feel like I was still dreaming,” he says. With his other band, A Letter For Ashley, too busy to perform or record, Celebrating became the outlet. “I desperately needed an outlet since I couldn’t explain what I felt in words.”
That helps explain why the project already sounds unstable in a good way.
Mitchell says no two Celebrating releases will sound exactly the same, and “Dance Music” treats that as a practical rule rather than an abstract promise. The tags around the EP — alternative, ambient, art rock, breakbeat, experimental rock, noise folk, nostalgic singer-songwriter, skramz — describe the edges of it, not the center. The center is harder to pin down.
It is dissociation, but with control. Mitchell says his mental health has improved a lot over the past year, and that he does not dissociate as often now, or in the same helpless way. The songs still carry that split-state feeling, though. They sound like they were made by someone trying to build a room sturdy enough to hold confusion without flattening it into explanation.
There are other people around the record too, even if Celebrating is a solo project. Jonah K. sent the breakbeats. Jayden B. lent the Behringer keyboard amp that gave the master its reverb. The artwork uses a photo and drawing by Mitchell, with thanks to Carter for letting him photograph his basement. The thank-you list also reaches out to parents, siblings, girlfriend Selah of Sunvale, friends Tony, Carter, Xavier, and Tate, plus Charly of Anhendia, Kevin S, Ash B, Greg C, the R family, Healer DIY, The Scrounge Around, and Camp Allendale. No AI was used in any part of the production.
“I’m still (and always will be) experimenting with my sound to deliver what I feel,” Mitchell says.
“Dance Music” is out now on Bandcamp, Mirlo, Mitchell’s website, and the Internet Archive if you know where to look.
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