Body

I Shall Die Here is the fourth full-length album by The Body. Sharing their moribund vision for I Shall Die Here with Bobby Krlic (aka The Haxan Cloak), the tried and true sound of The Body is cut to pieces, mutilated by process and re-animated in a spectral state by the newly minted partnership. The Body’s brutal musical approach, engraved by drummer Lee Buford’s colossal beats and Chip King’s mad howl and bass-bladed guitar dirge, becomes something even more terrifying with Krlic’s post-mortem ambiences serving as both baseline and outer limit. I Shall Die Here sonically serrates the remains of metal’s already unidentifiable corpse and splays it amid tormented voices in shadow.. A handful of precursor releases readied the band for seasoned explorations across their debut self-titled album (Moganano, 2003) and on the widely-acclaimed All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood (At A Loss, 2011). The Body’s curtailing of formal classification figured heavily on All the Waters. The album’s employment of the Assembly of Light Choir’s classical chorales alongside more industrial music techniques such as vocal sampling and drum programming in turn prompted RVNG to inquire with King and Buford which darker corners of the electronic universe they were presumably interested in exploring. The earnestly experimental undertaking of I Shall Die Here is expertly aided by Seth Manchester and Keith Souza, The Body’s longstanding engineers and creative collaborators, and noted producer Krlic.

Krlic’s own work as The Haxan Cloak struck a similarly despairing chord to The Body with last year’s celebrated Excavations (Tri Angle, 2013), itself a minimalist evocation of the afterlife. I Shall Die Here shares similar nether space with the morbidly deviating darkness of Excavations, but remains sculpturally frozen in a sort of earthen purgatory. On album opener “To Carry the Seeds of Death Within Me”, a dramatic pause partitions the seismic caterwauling and savage whump of the first half from the ambient, suffocating ripple of the second. From there, the dimensional doom marches on in procession, ceaselessly alternating between shape and shadow. According to the band themselves, they sought to create something wholly experimental with I Shall Die Here. In the course of its creation and recreation, they have attained that rare artistic goal: an album with few precedents and a paradigm shift richly realized. Bobby Krlic’s downcast electronic visions laces seamlessly into The Body’s already volatile mix of fissured doom metal and fused verbal spaces. The onset of a new music emerges with I Shall Die Here, and in its shifts, shadows, and reeling voices, the darkest possible formulation of electronic music has been realized.