Made up of Preoccupations drummer Mike Wallace, Protomartyr’s Greg Ahee, and artist/’song interpreter’ AJ Lambert, Bloodslide is an experimental new project that blurs the lines between styles and artforms. Ahee first worked with Lambert on her Lonely Songs EP, a sixtieth anniversary celebration of Only The Lonely by her grandfather Frank Sinatra, though Bloodlines pushes far beyond the crooned reimaginings of that release. Together with producer Sonny DiPerri and Ommatidium Studios, the trio build a cross-disciplinary space built upon a visceral combination of post-punk and noise rock, and complimented with various forms of visual art.
Described as the first of four multimedia works that will make up their self-titled debut EP, ‘Pica’ is a slouching beast of song that possesses a strange tension between menacing weight and haunting ethereality. The result is something densely physical yet intangible too, existing across a variety of planes and brought to life in sounds both menacing and sublime.
Such paradoxical sensations speak to the overarching themes. Pica refers to the compulsion of the same name, where individuals crave and consume non-nutritive substances. The condition is treated as a psychological disorder, abnormal behaviour that leads people to foods seen as unacceptable. “We wanted to focus on this attribution of ‘unacceptable’ characteristics,” the band explain. “This creation of abnormal value connections between objects. Our desire was to invoke similar divergent attributions of value within the visual space—specifically between the nouveau digital landscapes created by machine learning and other digital manipulations, and the body as it is experienced in the hyper-digitized moment.”
If both nature and the human body are sites of wonder and spiritual depth, then what is the implication of our increasing digitization of such sites? Bloodslide utilise medical imaging software to push further into this question, exploring how such technology reconfigures relationships with our bodies and environments. “Our digitization of these almost sacred elements allows us to highlight the divergent attributions of value we assign to these elements when experiencing them in the digital space,” they continue. “And the fact that we—like those who suffer from Pica—are constantly fighting an appetite to consume these digital ghosts.”
The track’s accompanying video aims to represent these ‘ghosts’ for what they really are. “Hybrids of value,” a myriad of innumerable elements constantly shifting and assembling into new forms. What Bloodslide call “a new evolution,” where an infinite number of novel forms are possible, as it is no longer constrained by the limits of physical space.
*WARNING: You may want to give the video a miss if you have photosensitive epilepsy*
‘Pica’ is out now and available from the Bloodslide Bandcamp page. Their self-titled EP will be released in July.
