Formats
ASP0029 - 7"
Details
‘Horrific Object’ is a limited debut 7” single by Nathaniel Mellors (The God In Hackney, Skill 7 Stamina 12, Conemelt). Released jointly by Box Editions (Los Angeles) and Junior Aspirin Records (Hampshire, U.K.) The track ‘Horrific Object’ fuses Nick Cave & The Birthday Party’s swaggering jazz-blues pulse and the lean menace of early PJ Harvey with a vocal narrative reminiscent of an early 20th century horror short story. (Think: Arthur Machen on vibes.) The song concerns a writer who is given the eponymous ‘horrific object’: a thing which is somehow encoded with a critique of the writer’s very existence - “all the air around you is infected”. The song takes aim at the presumptions of cultural ownership, inspired in part by “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, an essay on class and culture by the influential thinker Mark Fisher. ‘Horrific Object’ was originally written and recorded to accompany a sculpture of the same name which Mellors made for the 2020 Busan Biennale exhibition in South Korea. The AA side, ‘Irrigating Hell’, is about another kind of horror – that of displacement. The song ruminates on a move to Los Angeles and combines imagery of ecological, car and career-based catastrophe with a more industrial and textured landscape reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle. As 1/4 of The God In Hackney, Mellors released ‘Small Country Eclipse’ which was The Colloquium for Unpopular Culture’s Number One album of 2020, with repeat plays on BBC RADIO 6 from Steve Lamacq & Gilles Peterson. The God in Hackney’s ‘Cave Moderne’ was made Number One album of 2014 by Andrew Weatherall for NTS Radio.
Tracks
Press
Half opaque half translucent
pink / blue vinyl