“Cyberspace,” writes William Gibson, popularising the phrase in his seminal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, “[is a] consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.” Because as technology grows more sophisticated, the amount and intricacy of the information it records supasses human comprehension. Instead we must rely on simplifications, on cyberspace, that “graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…”
If contemporary society has reached some equivalent of Gibson’s vision, then They Are Gutting A Body of Water is a band determined to represent it. Originating as the solo project of Jouska’s Doug Dulgarian, the project first released a self-titled record that, in the words of Post-Trash, melded “sound clips from strange origins [with] grainy textures to create a feeling of simultaneous apathy and rejoice,” before teaming up with Apostrophe S for a collaborative visual album, Our Hologram Mother, on VHS. Later, the act crystallised into a full band and put out the LP Gestures Been, and is now back with a follow up.
Today we’re delight to share Destiny XL, the brand new record from They Are Gutting A Body of Water. Enlisting Josh Lesser (ex-Blue Smiley, Cooking, Horsecops, Spellbinder), Julia McCue (Lester), Ben Opatut (No Friends) and Cooper Beaupre (Null, Menu), as well as Gleemer‘s Corey Coffman on production duties, the album doubles down on the cyberpunk inspiration, from its experimental sound right through to the cover, which looks like the artwork of a PS1 game only available in Japan. The result is Dulgarian’s most ambitious and complete project to date, using both musical craft and sheer imagination to bring to life his own Gibsonian virtual reality.
To achieve this, the album’s physical release will consist of “a flash drive […] loaded with 2GB of music, videos, short stories, photos, and a custom startup menu,” possibly the most inventive one we can think of since Krill (allegedly) did that thing with the mozzarella. However, far from being a gimmick, the medium is fully in line with the themes of the record, representing its own self-contained cyberspace where complex stories and emotions are represented across various forms of data. They Are Gutting A Body of Water are weaving their own consensual hallucination, and the audience is invited in.
Working at the intersection between shoegaze, slowcore and experimental electronic music, the songs are diverse in style and tone yet linked by an ever-present texture. Forming the soundscape of Dulgarian’s world, this gauzey noise is equal parts thrilling and unsettling, and too large to resist in any case. William Gibson writes in Neuromancer that “the sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel,” and They Are Gutting A Body of Water achieve a similar sensation—the dense atmosphere moving beyond each singular song and coming to possess a strange physicality of its own.
The switches in genre feel like momentary stops through this endless fog. From the crushing rock of ‘Violence One’ and bedroom pop melancholy of ‘Eightball’ to the sparse hip hop of ‘I Would Love You’ and the dubstep drama of ‘Mother Plus’, influences are snatched and let go again with a kind of agitated frequency, Dulgarian trawling the raw data stream of the internet and throwing back whatever is dredged up from the murk.
The triumph of the record is how this all holds together. The tracks might not be united by the consistency of the sound, but in reality, or rather virtual reality, such a schizophrenic experience is the natural state. Existing side by side are sadness and joy and awe and peculiar dread too, as though within the juxtaposition of frantic activity and wide open space lies a power so raw it could tear you apart. The challenge is to remain human within such an environment, a world where tangible experience is slowly eroding, every loss replaced by the sprawling cybernetic alternative, captured only in the grainy frames of video static.
