The Body & Dis Fig "Orchids of a Futile Heaven"
Orchards of a Futile Heaven’s walls of sputtering texture and tectonic booms are soaked in the reverence and melancholy of sacred spaces brought to life by palpable intensity by Chen’s voice. Crafted during a time of personal fragility, the album’s devastating force lies beyond any of the expected noise and abrasive textures typically associated with both The Body & Dis Fig. Suffused with a raw vulnerability and a longing for catharsis, Chen’s voice searches for escape in the midst of oppressive atmospheres as if determined to find relief from guilt. “Eternal Hours” patiently unfurls waves of surprising sounds, whispered undulations that are punctuated by sudden crashes, all beneath Chen’s haunting harmonies. “Dissent, Shame” evokes grief and shame with a minimalist drone dirge that gradually builds to an enchanting choral passage. King’s guitar on “Holy Lance” matches the uncanny drone of Chen’s accordion in an all-consuming blast, Chen’s voice transforming the moment from anguish to defiance and empowerment. The album’s arc finishes with “Coils of Kaa” acting as a kind of propulsive exorcism, breaking through a suffocating air before the funeral procession of “Back to the Water” lays the album to rest.
While sampling has long been essential to each, The Body & Dis Fig deftly meld their differing approaches to sampling and creating extreme sounds until the boundaries are entirely blurred. The two found kinship in their desire to find new avenues to make heavy music that looked beyond tropes of metal and electronic music by merging the two. “I always wanted the heavier stuff but I also didn’t really like heavier guitar music,” says Buford. “None of it really felt quite heavy enough to me. A human can’t be as heavy as a machine.” Chen counters, “I love the balance. You could never connect to just a machine as well as you could a human. Which is why the combination is so potent for me. I don’t want to hide. I think nothing connects you more empathetically than another human’s voice.”
Orchards of a Futile Heaven affirms The Body & Dis Fig as skilled sound sculptors who have an exceptional ability to make deeply affecting music, bracing as it is touching, harrowing as it is awe-inspiring. Together, the two have harnessed their expansive artistry to make music that is profoundly emotional, and staggering in its beauty.
Maya Shenfeld "Under the Sun"
Under the Sun’s evocative title is an excerpt from a proverb “There’s nothing new under the sun” from Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) in the Old Testament. Shenfeld elaborates: “It’s an unusual book within the Old Testament that isn’t so much preoccupied with god or religion but rather reflects on life’s impermanence and the pursuit of meaning amidst change and uncertainty… this image of the Sun as a force of stability, change, and tension really stuck with me.” Shenfeld’s excerpted title creates a distance between the stoic philosophy of the proverb and the evidence this is distinctly not the case, especially in relation to the climate. Our environment is more than just an abstract theme, it is interwoven into Under The Son’s very sonic DNA. Field recordings taken deep within the still-active quarry in Portugal were recorded, quite literally, under the scorching sun on one of the hottest days on record in the country. Shenfeld extracted sounds from this scarred, deeply mined landscape, and threaded these samples into rich arrangements of synthesizers and acoustic instruments. She explains: “Our physical experience under the scorching sun (which was reflected by the white marble) gave shape to the album’s final form.” Sounds recorded closer to Shenfeld’s adopted home of Berlin provide a hopeful, human counterpoint, playing with tension and release. The atmospheres of Under the Sun evoke that push and pull through an eclectic and rich sonic palette, from the sacred sounds of the organ at St Matthew’s Church, to the ethereal voices of the Ritter Youthchoir conducted by Ann-Kristin Mayr. Reflections of her punk and electronic forays bubble up in a collaborative composition with Emptyset’s James Ginzburg, summoning raw, primal energy. Says Shenfeld “There’s a juxtaposition here between the heavy electronic processing, which could be the sound of a dystopian future or past, and the choir, which like in the Greek tragedy, could be the voice of a shared consciousness, and maybe a voice of a hopeful future.”
Rather than being nihilistic or fatalistic, Under the Sun instead encourages us to explore and rethink how we relate to our environment. Shenfeld’s slowly evolving, hypnotic pieces make canny use of repetition, space and silence to play with our very sense of time and our relationship to our surroundings, creating a space for deep listening that enables us to better attune our ears to the world around us, championing collective listening and collaboration as a force for change.
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The Special Pillow "The Sleep Pillows Meet the Space Monster"
What is the Space Monster? Some malevolent entity from the cosmic beyond or the void itself? Are we talking about outer or inner space? And is the monstrosity manifested as too much space or too little?
Talk Show "Effigy"
If Talk Show’s exhilarating full-length debut, Effigy, feels more like a film than an album, that’s no coincidence. The band crafted the collection to soundtrack to a fictional nightclub. “One of the biggest influences on this record was the intro to the movie Blade, where this character’s being dragged through a meatpacking plant and into the vampire rave,” says frontman Harrison Swann. “There’s so much tension and anticipation and intimidation in that scene. We wanted to create the kind of music we’d play if we were performing in that club, to put ourselves into that scene and see how far we could push it.