The image on the front of this album is well chosen. The music here feels like someone’s head being chunked apart and distorted into snapshot musical entities; emotional tangents given momentary life of their own. And diverse creatures they are: fairly-straightforward electronics to painfully-harsh noise, rounded out with slow, muffled, clouds of synthesizer. It’s as though the whole brain is being poured out which, yah know, would pretty well damage the head.
And who is playing themselves? Is someone being played like an instrument, are they creating music from their being, or is it the colloquial sense, like someone is fooling themselves? While it is very likely the latter, I like to think of it as the former, almost a response to a question:
“What are they using to make those godawful sounds?”
“Oh they’re playing themselves.”
Meanwhile, some kind of Tetsuo-esque composite of wires, electronics and cords is on stage, crashing around and creating an alternately migraine-inducing and euphoric series of direct feeling-to-sound expressions. That’s really what music, noisy or otherwise, should be though right? We want some kind of emotional component that we can cling to, even if it cuts us open when we hold it.
[Visit full site to view media]They're Playing Themselves by Secret Boyfriend