"It’s a kind of image, this country submerged in sticky gloop excreted by the neo-liberal machine. And us crawling around half blind through the sludge searching for refuge under a huge mountain of ill fitting Primark clothes. We nest in the synthetic fibres gasping for breath. Something like that anyway. Seems like reality to me."
- Benedict Drew
Working at an intersection of sound, video, performance, installation, and visual art, Benedict Drew is known for a shifting multi-format practice that engages with social and political concerns, piecing together narratives that pulse with the anxiety, comedy and tragedy of an ever stretching reality. Crawling Through Tory Slime is his debut long-playing record.
With empty stomach, vapour-filled pasty, vacant retail unit; each vessel and space Drew conjures over the record’s run-time rattles with a nakedly visible and politically-motivated abjection. In these sonic landscapes the strange and the surreal emerges in a wild and pictorial orchestration, just as frequently silly as sharp or sour, luridly manifesting in caked mud and cow pats and slime and toads. Sound shimmers, purrs and coalesces into a vivid psychedelic pasture, a material presence colliding with ad-hoc digital rendering to hark at electroacoustic physiognomy, science-fiction, and the very outer rim of rhythm and machine music caught in a state of near collapse.
The fear of the real, the dispossession of the fantasy. An emotional tide of anxiety rises to sweat gravy and dread all over.
credits
released June 30, 2017
Art by Benedict Drew and Gustavo Eandi
Vinyl mastered and lacquer cut by CGB @ Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin
Digital mixed and mastered by Benny Ill.
supported by 4 fans who also own “Crawling Through Tory Slime”
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