It’s a bit daunting to write psychoautobiographically about an invisible art form so I’m going to lead with intention - and maybe it is just the labyrinthitis that led me to this place - but basically I wanted to build something like a carnivorous plant growing in that little piss patch just left of the well-beaten earth stage front. Something dense, un-hygienic and purposefully inconvenient, like a smokers mating call for seducing your madness coming the other way. Rhythms descending and ascending staircases simultaneously, bathrooms with holes cut in the floor so you can see the crashing waves below - a giant lurching mechanism one loose screw away from collapse. Sadly nothing resembling a safe-room here, every wall is violently splattered with red paint - the decoration of a space built in one-take analog sessions with the back drop of murderous racist colonial ideologies ever encroaching on that zen garden I’m so desperate to include in the floor plan. This decrepit, boot-shaped bit of badlands is not without spirit though! James K’s voice will have you wanting to tie yourself to the mast of a ship! POiSON GiRL FRiEND’s shadow will elegantly echo survival tips as you move through the structure! That metaphor aside here’s another metaphor. This is the most rocks I’ve ever been able to fit in my mouth and still beat box. Does that count for anything? Thank you so much to the philosopher’s stone Gina Lee for the art layout and EVERYTHING else. Loric Sih for the incredible mastering and vocal recording help. Cato Ouyang (whose work has put pins through me on numerous occasions throughout the recording process) for permitting us to include the front illustration in the album art. Sam Clarke for being a joyously obsessed fire-starter who can literally make my mouth water when he talks about music (and for putting out the record of course). So many more… but basically the thing I care about most in the world is good conversation, so essentially this is a reflection of years of incredible conversations with brilliant minds on the margins. I love you!
Over a span of 10 or more years, and as many trips, I (we)(me + g) have been buying spirit-driven noise records on the 20th floor of apartment buildings (across from crematoriums generally) asking panther-eyed doms which Provoke photographer ordered which drink and how many, or following the architecture of Angel Dust, walking beneath the interlocking armored whale spines, trying to understand how the same artist could have produced both a hit city-pop record and another that sounded like burning chrome swirling in miso soup. These are just a few of the millions of threads that hold my Borghesian path together; the path of the pilgrim rather than the tourist. Although it has no end, it certainly has its vista points, and few, if any, have elicited more joyous contemplation than the point of intersection with Noriko. Someone whose record’s have drawn every shade of emotion out of me, whether a tall grass field I’ve sat in, or a half bursted bubble that nearly took my head off. To hear her voice drifting through the dusty corridors of this drum pattern, eternally tip-toeing just outside this wonked-up whirlpool, is beyond honorifics for me. It is truly the sense of life, and I am so grateful for it.
Mercury Fountain by @gaulplus featuring @poison_girl_friend_official out now on @rankandfile.cc
Mastered by @loric_work.account
Artwork by @ladydownfall
Photography by Eric Smith
