Collaboration Through Laceration Garrett Gregory

COLLABORATION

THROUGH LACERATION

ILLUSTRATION Marion Moseley

WORDS Garrett Gregory

Telling the music industry to go fuck itself is a favorite pastime of musicians. The popularity of this act can make distinguishing oneself incredibly difficult for enterprising artists. Nonetheless, Sacramento-based experimental rap group Death Grips found a way to do just this in 2012. Epic, their record label, had decided to delay the release of the group’s second studio album, No Love Deep Web, until 2013. In response, the group leaked the album online. For its cover artwork, they chose a picture of the erect penis of Zach Hill, the band’s drummer, with the album title scrawled on it in Sharpie.

There is typically a point of saturation for groups employing such visceral imagery. New efforts to create visual spectacles often lose their impact with increasingly jaded audiences. On September 19, 2017 Death Grips proved with a cryptic Instagram post they are far from reaching this point.

The post was a picture of a man grinding his face against a broken pane of glass, simply captioned “Working with Lucas Abela.” With no further explanation provided, beholders could only ask “Who is this guy? Why is he doing this to himself?”

In a certain respect, Lucas Abela is a musician who defies classification. Experimentation in media most people would find inconceivable has led him to his current and most recognizable project: a shard of glass attached to a contact microphone. To produce music, Abela presses the glass into his face and blows into it. Butchering his own visage is not an end goal, but a functional inevitability.

Self-mutilation would seem divergent with the goals of most musicians. For Abela, it fits well into a larger body of work that uses idiosyncratic production techniques in making music. Among them are two interactive installations rooted in arcade games—Paku Paku and The Temple of Din.

Paku Paku invites the participant to use a joystick to steer a hovercraft loosely resembling Pac Man through a maze with a floor composed of luminescent tiles. The light from these tiles is converted from the audio frequencies of local radio stations, which are read by the hovercraft and converted back into sound. The finished piece, in Abela’s own words, “creates an aural zeitgeist by randomly mixing music, advertising, and spoken word plucked from local

broadcasts.” Repeated conversion and reconversion between light and sound presents a strikingly circuitous approach to music production, but a straightforward route to making music is clearly Abela’s last concern.

The pinball machines that make up The Temple of Din are instrumental Frankenstein’s monsters. Music is generated when the user hits a ball with paddles, which are in some cases controlled by piano keys, toward an assortment of guitar strings, piano wires, and chimes. What is produced as a result is predictably cacophonous and disorienting. At its debut at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the installation was a big hit with children, something difficult to predict based on the grotesque picture that drew Abela to most people’s attention.

How exactly Abela’s work will mesh with Death Grips is anyone’s guess. Rather than provide insight, an examination of his largely disparate past work means that his contribution could come in virtually any form. On his Instagram, he recently posted a video of his infant son inadvertently hitting himself in the face with a play rattle. The caption, “hurts himself making music,” lends insight into a fundamental tenet of his art—that the two activities he mentions are inherently inseparable.

“The caption, ‘hurts himself making music,’ lends insight into a fundamental tenet of his art—that the two activities he mentions are inherently inseparable.”