BodyLepsis is a compilation album in response to austerity, tories and anti-rave bills. It is Rave as-Protest, a visceral expression of disdain for the current political climate, outrage through noise, a poetic communal uproar; a strong artistic recording of our current cultural landscape. It demands a hijack of spaces and ourselves to recentre the people at the heart of hardcore. It’s an outline of our ethos: anti-corporation and anti-copshavinglimbs.
This release figures rave as ritual, as a form of protest; losing yourself in the rave is the dissolution of the body as encumbrance, world, and prison that protest aims to produce, a rave is a riot. The rave is inexorably a reaction to material conditions, contemporary politics of space, expression, atomic collision of subversive noise pollution and the sanitised, enforced sonic landscape of the capitalist metropolis, a space figuring the dancefloor as a space, of not an escape from; but confrontation with, suffering, in pursuit of not some abstract catharsis but material change, a soundclash against suffering.
The release is an attempt to platform artists whose sonics trace the edges of comprehensibility, create states of ritualistic excess, make too many feelings felt, artists whose music is a maximalist of affect. Exploring the edge-case of dance as movement modulated with violence proportional to the extremity of metropolitan ennui, turning the noise within us against the world that produces it, brain-fog-as-instrument, through which we approach an emergent musicality. These sonics are a seizure, a hijack of sonics and spaces. The release is an ode to the hard-fought fragments of nomadic reverie in a sound-system culture in a subcultural landscape which is still reeling from the double repression and institutionalization of rave culture, nonstop since the 90s, and of counterculture in general, since forever.
Bodylepsis gathers tracks from Gutterring affiliated artists; producers and Djs that have played Gutterring parties who share the same outrage and ethos. This includes the likes of Marojorie W.C
Sinclair (Evanora unlimited), Marceldune, Lyzza, DJ Fingerblast, Julien Andreas, Caro, Gutterring’s own whitetrashtray, and many more artists that have been making their mark in the underground music scene. This release offers a platform for an audience to be introduced to new unreleased material, both local and international, by a sensory philosophy; a philosophy which cross-contaminates sonic landscapes and subcultural realities.
For the past 2 years Gutterring has become a staple name in the London music scene, as well as garnering a following worldwide, from haphazard parties in lost and forgotten locations, to art space takeovers and an NTS radio residency. With such success comes the expectation to continue to connect those that put faith in the brand, to the important sounds of the scene. This compilation comes as an extension to an ever-growing party that has already rattled the city to its very core; and aims to set the expectation to become a trusted forecaster of music and culture for years to come. BodyLepsis is out on the 30th of September and you can pre-order it at: https://gutterring.bandcamp.com/album/bodylepsis-2
All tracks mastered by VoidBoi (unless otherwise noted). All profits go to The Outside Project charity.
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Last modified: September 21, 2022
