Okay, 2018 newbies. This is it. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and quit boppin’ around to Bruno Mars and Wings and shit. It’s practically February, and you’ve got new feelings to feel, new theories to ponder, new and brave and visceral and transcendent dimensions of ART to experience.
If I were you, my very first call would be to the illimitably daring Australian label Room40. And you’re in luck, because it just-so-happens that they’re about to release a new “CD/book” by Australian sound artist Thembi Soddell, an electro-acoustic composer and practice-based researcher focused on “the articulation of firsthand experiences of mental illness, trauma and psychological distress using sound art practice.”
Love Songs represents the most recent strange fruits of her labors, and it’ll be available April 12 from the Room40 in all of it’s glorious unrelenting darkness. According to the press release, this Musique concrète-oriented “work of extreme dynamics and intensities” is “easily the clearest articulation of her methodologies,” amounting to nothing less than “one of the most fierce sonic expressions to be delivered from an Australian artist in recent years.”
The album’s title Love Songs “is a little dark humour on my behalf,” as Thembi explains. “As the compositional process evolved the work became a meditation on the lived experience of insidious forms of abuse within supposedly loving relationships, in connection to certain forms of mental illness. These experiences are ones of extremes and emotional intensities; the tensions between horror, beauty, rage, desire, confusion, love and perceptual annihilation.”
So what do you say? Ready to turn off those silly love songs for a little while and allow yourself to be profoundly unsettled? Great. Then check out the new video for the track “Epilogue” down below, head here to pre-order the album, and mark your calendar for the world premiere of Love Songs live at Victoria, Australia’s The Substation on March 23 (during which Room40 boss Lawrence English will also be performing his TMT-approved “response to the current geo-political climate” Cruel Optimism, do NOT sleep on this).
Love Songs tracklisting:
01. Object (Im)Permanence
02. Erasure
03. Repetition Compulsion
04. Who Is To Blame?
05. Epilogue
Lawrence English Cruel Optimism + Thembi Soddell Love Songs World Premiere:
03.23.18 - Victoria, Australia - The Substation (tickets)
More about: Thembi Soddell
