Gut - Daniel Blumberg - Vinyl LP Record (Arrives in 50 days)

GUT is an unflinchingly raw and personal album, a radical departure from
Blumberg’s previous work and one that firmly establishes him in a
unique space within experimental music practice. It makes oblique
reference to the intestinal disease Blumberg has suffered in the last few
years, but more than that, it is an elemental and corporeal suite of six
inter-connected songs that trace a body stripped back and rebuilt:
renderings of pain, frustration and fatigue in ballads made sinew and
bone; an extraordinary vocal that reaches beyond the body to escape
the malfunctions of the flesh; and a musical accompaniment that draws
breath and rhythm in unruly and original forms.
This sense of impulse and improvisation saturates the album from its
literal subject matter all the way through to its recording strategies
which have a directness that situates the album in a timeless space, its
song forms authentically frank and immediate. "When the songs came
together, I played it as a continuous piece," he says, recording the
majority of the half hour long album in one uninterrupted vocal take,
adding few overdubs and manipulation alongside the bold and spare
instrumentation that includes bass harmonica, Steinberger ebass,
synthesiser and electronic drums. The bass harmonica, in particular, was
the instrument which "glued it all together, in this manifestation of
breath, and the bass – it is the guts of the record".
The video for ‘CHEERUP’ is taken from a forthcoming album length film
directed by Brady Corbet (Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux). “The film was
shot on 16mm black and white film; a series of motion picture portraits
in which we set out to capture Blumberg’s very essence”, says Corbet. “I
was struck by the album's theme: the stomach. The stomach is a topic
which is as off-limits as speaking frankly about mortality in a social
setting. As stomach trouble relates to the end of a relationship, the
death of the ego, and acceptance of what it means to be human, it's a
definitive offering.” Shot in a disused industrial complex in New York, the
film renders Blumberg naked and vulnerable in high contrast whites and
deep black. It displays the tensions of the mind defeated by the body:
strained sinews rendered in stark celluloid, direct and uncompromising
in its examining gaze.

Tracklist

1. Bone
2. Cheerup
3. Holdback
4. Body
5. Knock
6. Gut

Label: Mute | Origin: Holland