Marcus Whale's 'Music of the Masochistic and of Despair' playlist
· Thursday March 31, 2016
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Ears Have Ears have been bringing the lesser known aural goods to radio listeners for some time now. The show invites musicians and sound artists to make experimental soundtracks weekly along with digging around in the backwater scenes for unusual gems to broadcast. They're now opening the doors of FBi in Sydney and inviting punters to come and see some of the mystery happen live. First up is producer and experimental pop singer Marcus Whale (of Collarbones, Black Vanilla fame) followed by a probing Q&A from multi-faceted artist Pia Van Gelder.
Marcus is also releasing his debut solo album Inland Sea this month and will be launching it all over the place, so he provided us with the following mixtape as a swampy palate cleanser ahead of his E.H.E performance. Take it away Marcus…
In the spirit of Thursday night's broadcast on FBi, this playlist takes cues from an obsession with the extremes of human experience, the inescapability of the dead and from death and the uncanny feeling of being inside a body.
Thou, 'Ode to Physical Pain'
This is the final track from Thou's 2014 album “Heathen”, probably my favourite doom release of the past few years, an almost narrative journey in aesthetic masochism and existential dread - although it's hardly possible for us to ascertain how physically real these ideas are for Thou's singer and lyricist.
The Body,'To Carry The Seeds of Death With Me'
There's something truly horrifying about the ghostly screeching coming from The Body's singer here and the production from The Haxan Cloak, rather than smoothing out The Body's viscerally DIY sonic strategies, only amplifies the feeling of dread.
Scott Walker & Sunn O))), 'Brando'
This song imagines Marlon Brando, through his many on-screen beatings, as an arch-masochist.
The Haxan Cloak, 'Miste'
From one of the darkest albums I've ever heard, “Excavation”, the relentless, sadistic twisting of a hugely reverberated vocal sample.
Coil, 'Tainted Love'
A truly tortured version of this song with distinctly personal overtones of the AIDS epidemic among the queer in the 1980s.
Isis, 'Red Sea'
There's a quote in this song (and throughout this ep, The Red Sea) that comes from “Hotel Room”, a David Lynch TV special from 1993, and I'm not sure of the context of the line. In this context, the sludgey riffing of Isis c. 1999, this seems to speak to the idea that even normal, normative people have darkness in them.
