An album worth mentioning just came out on the great Post Present Medium label, headed by No Age’s Dean Spuntz. PPM has released records by many highly acclaimed left coast bands (Mika Miko, Wavves, and No Age of course) and the streak continues with the new LP/CD by Kyle Parker, here working under his Infinite Body alias. My first exposure to Infinite Body was a one-sided 12” on Arbor called A Series of False Awakenings, and I remember being surprised and charmed by this 17-minute musique concrete piece that drifted in and out of place, time, and melody. The kind of piece that feels unassuming at first but still holds up weeks and months later. After tracking down two other releases of his (a bristling, sometimes ecstatic LP called CMBCMEINAPTD and a stunning, meditative tape on Young Tapes), I am without question following future output…which brings us to this new album, called Carve Out the Face of My God.
I don’t think this music is inherently complicated, but when was that ever a prerequisite? Parker gets great mileage out of his setup—so far as I can tell, he’s often sourcing keyboards, melodica or something that achieves that same buzzing chordal quality through a ton of reverb and overdrive. What you end up with is music that seems to float above itself, achieving a kind of middle ground between the melodic gauze of shoegaze and the more traditional noise that he produced earlier under different names. And then sometimes all of the distortion is stripped down and everything sounds like it is being transmitted from a cathedral. Lovely.
He’s definitely doing this better than most people out there, so please…support this man. You can here the brief, cathedral-esque “Lived On Its Knees (For Matt)” from the new LP below.
posted by Ned Milligan
