Vents MagaZine Music and Entertainment Magazine
Related Articles
James Krivchenia (drummer and producer of Big Thief) announces his new experimental album, Blood Karaoke, out April 15th on Reading Group, and today shares its lead single, “Emissaries Of Creation.” Krivchenia’s solo work continues to surprise and Blood Karaoke has perhaps the widest palette of any of his work to date. Driving through a near-constant barrage of sound and information, the album passes through zones of hardcore techno, poptimistic kitsch cruisers, glitched out quasi-grooves, and deeply weird YouTube ambience. Blood Karaoke is a private dance record appropriate for the overstimulated weirdness of our world.
Blood Karaoke is composed mostly from hundreds of tiny samples of unwatched YouTube videos found through random online generators (such as Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentations, video game walkthroughs, old local news clips, etc), mangled midi fed into Krivchenia’s rig of synthesizers and pedals, and then meticulously layered and collaged. Work on Blood Karaoke began in summer of 2019 while Krivchenia was living in New Mexico and was finished in his Los Angeles home in April of 2020. “It was a very iterative, long process,” says Krivchenia of creating the album. “Lots of editing and putting together little moments or 10 second chunks with lots of samples. The music was conceived to be a somewhat unbroken 40 minute long composition and I think of the singles as excerpts.” Opening track “Emissaries Of Creation” encapsulates the chaotic, cyber world of Blood Karaoke.
Listen to James Krivchenia’s “Emissaries Of Creation”
Krivchenia is a many-armed sculptor of music capable of deconstructing and rebuilding the auditory world around him. Known primarily for his roles in Big Thief, Mega Bog (as longtime engineer, co-producer and percussionist), and his various other groups and session work (ranging from Causings to Taylor Swift), Krivchenia has been quietly building strange musical worlds in parallel with his own experimental records. You’re Useless, I Love You (2016), No Comment (2018), and A New Found Relaxation (2020) show an increasing clarity of intentional framing while never sacrificing the material joy of making music. You’re Useless decoded the pop palate through a mutation of the sounds for a strangely unsettling sugar rush; No Comment worked through heavier concepts, culling from the audio of body camera footage of gun skirmishes from wars around the world uploaded to the internet; and Relaxation was composed from over hundreds of tiny fragments of “internet spa radio” processed through Krivchenia’s magic box of sonic transformations.
Bold combinations abound and Blood Karaoke ends up being a baffling translation, as if an alien were composing a mixtape as a misguided offering of understanding to the humans of 2022. The laughter it provokes is as much an effect of the juxtapositions of its musical worlds as from the strangely uncanny seriousness of AI-generated poetry. Blood Karaoke often sounds like an experiment in accepting the disparate sounds and feelings of our world, online and otherwise, and trying to find the poetry contained within the chaos.
Pre-order Blood Karaoke
Blood Karaoke Tracklist
1. Emissaries Of Creation
2. Null States
3. Culture Complex
4. Calendrical Rot
5. Artifact Of Error
6. Inherited Forms
7. The Trackless Way
8. Scaleable Future Self Continuity Interventions
9. Sub – Creational Reality
10. The Science Of Imaginary Solutions
11. God In Every Way
12. Styles Of Imprisonment
13. Exaptation
14. Wall Facer
