The Body

The Body’s brutal musical approach comes courtesy of drummer Lee Buford’s colossal beats and Chip King’s mad howl and bass-bladed guitar dirge. Formed in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1999, The Body soon relocated to Providence, Rhode Island, where the duo remained for a decade before moving west to their current home of Portland, Oregon. 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. And it was their combination of classical chorales from the Assembly of Light Choir with more industrial music techniques, such as vocal sampling and drum programming, that prompted RVNG to inquire about what other dark corners of the electronic universe they were interested in exploring.

I Shall Die Here is the fourth full-length album by The Body. Sharing their moribund vision 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. Punishingly pensive and intriguingly earnest, the release was also expertly aided by Seth Manchester and Keith Souza, The Body’s longstanding engineers and creative collaborators.

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 are fused seamlessly into The Body’s already volatile mix of fissured doom metal and fused verbal spaces. And the onset of a new music emerges with I Shall Die Here, for in its shifts, shadows, and reeling voices, the darkest possible formulation of electronic music has been realized.