You No Form
the rotary voices coming in or from within contrasts and compliments the emotional flatlining drones and austere atmosphere. My favorite debut in a long time
Favorite track: Urnshaped Murmuration.
Iris Our is the new surrealist duo of artists Kiera Mulhern and Sydney Spann. Recital is honored to present their debut album, Victual Vittle Bottle Cunt.
Both Mulhern and Spann have released celebrated solo works on Recital: Mulhern’s De ossibus 20 (2020) and Spann’s Sending Up A Spiral Of (2023). Close friends, they would meet up weekly on Saturdays to record; channeling their love, angst, and wit. The synergism of their friendship is evident: poems read in tandem, flanking each other's syllables and breaths. Voice, synthesis, various electronics, and kinetic field recordings (often from their shared lives) form the material.
The album’s conceptual core is femininity understood through diffusion, imitation, and horror, alongside themes of debt, addiction, and inheritance. Vestiges of these can be heard in verbal intercourses through an industrial hiss emerging from the CD. As the artists write: “the obscene impossibility of having a mouth that sucks, eats and speaks, and of a voice that commands, soothes, and curses.”
Many of the texts began as hand-drawn concrete poems by the duo. “Urnshaped Murmuration” stages Spann and Mulhern reciting texts in the left and right channels, chasing each other in a lapping ocean of shadow sounds. The final track “Erections of Angels Directed at Me” is immense. A hushed This Mortal Coil-esque melody is sung, as flush oscillators churn autonomously. Smoldering flutes glow ahead of distant metallic havoc. Despite its condensed 26-minute runtime, the album feels dense, commanding, and total.
The result is an authentic, sharp mythology—visceral research into “the body as disposable, the body as the object of medicine, the body as etched with words, the body in revolt.”
Victual Vittle Bottle Cunt was engineered by Katie Von Schleicher, mixed by Theodore Cale Schafer, and mastered by Sean McCann. The pastel album cover by Maggie Fitzpatrick showcases a barren alley with a parked Tesla engulfed in flames. The release includes a booklet of concrete poems, artwork by the duo, and artist portraits by Gram Hummell.
supported by 23 fans who also own “Victual Vittle Bottle Cunt”
Beautifully cinematic, audio documentary with shades of the greatness of Errol Morris. My ears say this is the best documentary I saw (with my ears) and with my own inner vision. Deeply Personal sleepwalking with surreal transitions of a lucid dream. atelierlala
A stellar compilation featuring shoegaze and indie favorites like Drowse, Midwife, and Mount Eerie benefitting Project Onward in Chicago. Bandcamp New & Notable May 11, 2023
Shards of static & distortion crash against disarmingly beautiful piano & synth melodies on this riveting new record from Carbon and Prose. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 30, 2022
supported by 22 fans who also own “Victual Vittle Bottle Cunt”
Eerie, expansive, and breathtaking. This is ambient drone on an epic scale. The effect that some of these pieces have when they abruptly end is shattering -- these sounds become a part of your consciousness, and when they drop away, you're left in silence more intense than you've ever felt. Steven Moses