Pax Aeternum presents Drag Your Coffin My Lord, the second exploratory album from Asheville, North Carolina/Oakland, California-based COLLAPSE CULTURE, the electronic/psychedelic hybrid duo formed by Ian Miller (Kowloon Walled City, Interesting Times Gang, Stangelight) and Graham Scala (Bleach Everything, US Christmas, Interstitia).
Drag Your Coffin My Lord acts in much the same way as the group’s debut – as a means of processing the dire qualities of the current zeitgeist that become more intense and overwhelming by the day. But while the new album possesses similar genre agnostic qualities to their previous work, the approach is taken to greater extremes through a synthesis of diverse components into a varied and ever-shifting panorama, with their heretofore established mix of grainy cinematic dub textures and maximalist post-punk techno propulsion augmented with cosmic disco jeremiads, Atom Age educational filmstrip synthwave, and hauntological Morlock psychedelia.
Both the group’s members have decades’ worth of background in heavier music with bands like Kowloon Walled City, US Christmas, Bleach Everything, Less Art, Strangelight, Souvenir’s Young America, and Forensics, and the sense of rawness and immediacy present in those bands shines through in COLLAPSE CULTURE despite it diverging starkly from their better-known projects. Though the duo’s intention was to make a dance record, the end result is something weightier and more confrontational, a bracing and engaging sequence of battle hymns for spiritual warfare.
All music on Drag Your Coffin My Lord was created by Ian Miller and Graham Scala in their respective homes in Oakland and Asheville, with mixing, mastering, and art handled by Scala.
With the first foretaste of Drag Your Coffin My Lord, “Nuclear Semiotics (Superstructure Collapse),” Scala writes, “This was the first track I completed for the album. Our first record had been an attempt to make dancier music than our normal bodies of work that turned into something weirder, so with this batch of songs, I wanted to really try my best to actualize the initial intention. The title came from the study of ways to indicate the danger of nuclear waste sites throughout the entirety of their ten-thousand-year half-life in a way that will be immediately recognizable across the millennia. It’s fascinating in the sense that it’s a problem that has no historical parallel and has produced some really wild suggested solutions (for instance a religion characterized by an atomic priesthood that would treat the sites as holy/forbidden or the breeding of cats whose fur would change color in the presence of radiation so the danger would be immediately apparent regardless of language). But it’s also terrifying because none of the solutions posed are obviously feasible. If I had realized the challenges that making this album would entail, I likely wouldn’t have named the first completed track after a heretofore unsolved and possibly unsolvable problem but if you can’t hex yourself who can you hex?”
COLLAPSE CULTURE’s “Nuclear Semiotics (Superstructure Collapse)” is now streaming RIGHT HERE.
Dark Operative’s digital imprint Pax Aeternum will release Drag Your Coffin My Lord on September 16th. Find preorders at Bandcamp HERE and watch for additional preview tracks from the album to post shortly.
Drag Your Coffin My Lord Track Listing:
1. Existence Decay (Wherever There’s Hope There’s A Trial)
2. Nuclear Semiotics (Superstructure Collapse)
3. Room 641A (Ecology Of Fear)
4. Wasp And Orchid (The Map Precludes The Territory)
5. Bail Money Stashed In The Crawl Space (Non Frustra Vixi)
6. Strategy Of Tension (King Kill 33)
7. Dead Mall Blues (Negative Epiphanies And Necropolitics)
8. Cosmoclastic (Alius Mundus Est Inevitabilis)
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