Immolate Yourself
There's another album on this list that's splashed with death, but we'll get to that one later. For now, we're on this:
A 31-year-old Louisiana-born musician -- missing from a Wicker Park residence since an argument with his girlfriend last week -- has been found dead in the Near Northwest Side neighborhood.
There isn't a hint of death or tragedy on Immolate Yourself. What happened after the album was released...it's worth acknowledging for factual purposes, worth knowing because it serves as a piece of information, but it's got nothing--absolutely nothing--whatsoever to do with the piece of music that Charles Cooper and Joshua Eustis created.
That's it for that. We're on this:
It's a physical piece of shit with silver oxide on it wrapped around an aluminum spool. - Joshua Eustis
The article that quote comes from is well written, but it's a well written article that anticipates a more than passing familiarity with the technology used in electronic music production. (That's not a criticism--EM isn't a general interest magazine, despite the pretty photography. It should read like inside baseball, and some of it does.) A lot of the specific information in the article is going to slip by most people, but the general thrust of the article--that Eustis and Cooper were tired of what they'd been doing, and wanted to try something different--isn't dissimilar to what a lot of people claimed to feel over the last few years. They wanted something different. They went about the creation of that difference by utilizing different techniques--analog, their own voices in place of samples, etc. The question that remains: did it work?
The answer is hard to come by. From this point of view, Immolate Yourself sounds like a collection of electronic songs, most of which loop and careen into one another, forming a non-danceable collage of atmosphere and sound. Occasional vocals--"I know that you are the worst thing in the world/for me"--often delivered with an absence of emotional direction, neither complaining nor authoritative, merely detached and observational. It's not bleak or drone-y, and despite a bit of post-punk blips of squalor, hiding amongst new wave synth samples, the album isn't particularly excited about anything. (For the hell of it, I threw it on while driving a pick-up truck down a dirt road, and despite the luxurious freedom of blast-capable woofers, the songs sounded less alive than they do playing through the privacy of headphones. No matter how open the landscape of "Mostly Translucent" becomes in the final minute, it's a timid song, it's shy, it doesn't crave the street.) This isn't dance music, no matter what the lyrics and beats of "Helen of Troy" might imply. Ecstasy would help, but good ecstasy has been a pain in the ass to find lately.
But if the only notable differences that went into the creation of Immolate Yourself require the discerning ear of the fanatic or fellow practitioner to find, if the fact that the album's alpha "we will change our methods" philosophy is one that requires a late stage reading of an article from March of this year to learn--how much does the intent matter?
Not much, as it were. Before anybody found out that Charles Cooper died, Immolate Yourself was one of the most addictive pieces of music that came out this year. Before the explanations were read into record, the end result had escaped: this, the best piece of work the duo had ever created. Devoid of arrogance, almost irritating in its pursuit of wide-eyed exploration, completely satisfied with what was sure to be--and remains--a small audience of loyalists, this was one of those experiences nobody could have sold you on. It's one that you ended up finding on your own.
-Tucker Stone, 2009
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