A stunning and sometimes dark mix of downtempo, ambient and IDM

There may be a million stories in the naked city, but William Collin Snavely (Diagram of Suburbam Chaos or DOSC) believes they’ve got nothing on the weirdness that thrives on the periphery of every great metropolis. There are also countless dreams that go unfulfilled, and undercurrents of “despair and loneliness” that run just as strong in the land of two-car garages and manicured lawns.

These conflicting emotions form the crux of his work. The music features ear-catching, otherworldly timbres and skittering, erratic lines of tactile, textured beats set against backdrops of three- and four-note motifs fashioned from tone colors as vivid as any hues found in Georgia O’Keefe’s painting, stretched into hypnotic vapor trails. The vivid imagery that seems to imbue each of his tracks is just as essential to the music’s aesthetic as the specific sounds that suggest the pictures.

“They develop in parallel,” says Snavely, who also loves graphic design, photography, and film. “I’ll be writing a track, and as I’m writing, I’ll think of the exact movement an individual or subject might be making, or how the scene should look.”

While many composers of instrumental electronic music baldly deny any intentional emotional or programmatic content in their work, Snavely insists his work is crafted with both a narrative and vivid feelings in mind.

1. Plateau - K2 - Subconscious Communications
2. Plaid - Dead Sea - Warp
3. DOSC - Untitled - Unreleased
4. Plaid - White's Dream - Aniplex Inc.
5. DOSC - Sounds for the hole in your head - Unreleased
6. DOSC - Untitled - Unreleased
7. DOSC - Nerve Cycle - Audiobulb
8. DOSC - Ghosty Smoothie - Unreleased
9. DOSC - Seize and Reload - Unreleased
10. DOSC - Futile - Unreleased
11. Aphex Twin - Icct Hedral (Philip Glass Version) - Warp
12. DOSC - AM-Schiz - Unreleased
13. DOSC - Untitled - Unreleased
14. Plaid - Masato Shuffle - Beat Records
15. DOSC - Atoms Apart (slow) - Unreleased
16. DOSC - Giving In - Unreleased
17. The KLF - 3 A.M. Somewhere Out of Beaumont - KLF Communications
18. Download - Base Metal - Subconscious Communications