You may remember a few years ago AJ Lambert, who is the daughter of Nancy Sinatra, released a tribute album to her grandfather Frank Sinatra that featured Protomartyr guitarist Greg Ahee. They've now formed a new project, Bloodslide, that also includes Preoccupations drummer Mike Wallace. Collaborating with producer Sonny DiPerri (Protomartyr, Diiv, Animal Collective) and Ommatidium Studios, Bloodslide is conceptualized as a multimedia project, both music and visual art.
An EP is due out in July and they've just shared the first single, "Pica." You can hear a little of Protomartyr and Preoccupation's tense, post-punk styles here, with layers of distorted, atmospheric guitars and huge crashing drums, but Lambert's smoky vocals pull "Pica" into new territory. The striking video, made by Ommatidium Studios, is as intense as the song, featuring morphing landscapes, metallic skeletal images, and lasers. It's intense (and carries a strobe warning.) Here's more about "Pica":
Pica - the compulsive appetite for substances considered outside the realm of the acceptably consumable, ice, hair, metal. We wanted to focus on this attribution of “unacceptable” characteristics - 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. Both of these elements are deeply connected, nature as it exists in its unmolested state, and the human body are both deeply spiritual, deeply sublime entities. And yet both of these have had their form moulded and repurposed by their digitization. We created digital representations of both of these entities. Through the use of ML image datasets we created morphing, eerily familiar yet non-real landscapes. And through medical imaging software - specifically the use of volumetric DICOM data (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is the standard for the communication and management of medical imaging information and related data) and 3D modelling techniques we created physically accurate, yet still explicitly digital bodies. 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, and the fact that we - like those who suffer from Pica - are constantly fighting an appetite to consume these digital ghosts. As the video progresses, our examinations of the true nature of these ghosts becomes even more clear - showing them for what they are. Hybrids of value, which are composed of countless individual elements, which blend and mould into one another. A new evolution which is no longer shackled by the constraints of physicality that both nature and our tangible bodies are so intertwined with.
