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12"
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SBKT 033EP
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One of the great truths of today's reality is that it's mostly fake. Technological advancement, in a dual process of exteriorization (our memories and organs extended into manipulated artifacts) and interiorization (artificial structures installed as prostheses), has muddied our waters so that we are unable to tell truths from lies, actuality from abstraction. Musing on the contemporary culture of "deepfakes", where interlocking algorithms meet the omnipresence of surveillance, Eli Osheyack's Memory Hierarchy is a gesamtkunstwerk, crystallized into the memorial device of a record. When first performed live at Unsound Festival in 2019, Osheyack, together with collaborator, the late Adam Dupré, captured and live-streamed the audiences' motions. Evidence of this event is rendered here as album artwork, transporting audiences into a doubly displaced moment in time. With its almost epical structure, punctuated by recurring howls and gasps, "Liar's Dividend" feels like an omen -- of, among other things, a Nietzschean last man suffering from gluttony. On the B-side, "Mutual Shaping" and "Tertiary" leave you, instead, reveling in warped time and disorientation.
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LP
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BDNX 002LP
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"At the crux of American-born, Shanghai-based producer Eli Osheyack's debut album, Sadomodernism, is a question of agency. Borrowed from film theory, the album title was originally coined by writer Moira Weigel to describe a waning European art house tradition that vehemently rejects 'naïve pleasure' - the tranquilizing comfort of conventional cinematic narrative, like mainstream Hollywood - and opts for violence and pain, with the aim of shaking audiences out of cinematic manipulation and into their own position vis-à-vis the malaise of contemporary life. Echoing the work of sadomodernist auteurs, Osheyacks's Sadomodernism is a deeply political project with critical ambitions. The smashing and blending of genres, from techno, industrial, noise and gabber to ballroom and metal, even opera, and spontaneous percussion arrangements, sometimes mixed with distorted spoken word, do not mean to please, but provoke through disorder and chaos. Laden with Brechtian alienation affects, Sadomodernism interrogates the notion of autonomy in contemporary music, club culture, and social-political life."
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