"'You Are Under Our Space Control' is firebrand US group Object Collection's inimitable Slip return: a utopian space-opera, a homing signal cast into an empty universe, a beacon for an aesthetically radical future. Drawing on space travel, transhumanism, astronautics and the resurrection of the dead, Kara Feely's texts rehearse a progressive politics through a total re-envisioning of everyday life. Travis Just's limber speech-song vocal parts are eerily and spasmodically FX'd, and navigate surprisingly glistening instrumentals - a headlong tangle and squelch of flexing 808s and metal objects, roboticised guitar, and unreal synthesis.
YAUOSC's bubbling force belies its diverse, unruly underpinnings. The opera’s musical backbone is a drum-machine transcription of John Cage's 1951 piano solo 'Music Of Changes', a landmark of indeterminacy; its title grabbed from Cy Roth's sci-fi romp 'Fire Maidens From Outer Space' (1951); its texts inspired by Sun Ra and the Russian Cosmists’ poetics and philosophies, and interviews from real (and imagined) space travellers and astronomers.
Object Collection charge these impulses with a burning, engrossing physicality. This is, above all, an LP of heaving, life-giving music, deep in the mess of futuristic fervour."
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Artwork by Frank Eickhoff.
Available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC
Tracklisting:
1. Full Contrast
2. Human, Humans
3. Wow
4. Ships
5. Total Trance
6. Up Up Up Up Up Up
7. In The Work Collective
8. Back To The Planet
9. Rainbow Dress
10. Revolutionary Goals
11. More Hospitable Than Antartica Might Be
12. What About Our Aesthetics
13. Look at Television
14. New Suns
15. Death is Dead
16. Wild and Shimmering
17. Thinking About Equations
18. An Unrestriction of Space
Object Collection was founded in 2004 by writer/director Kara Feely and composer/musician Travis Just. The Brooklyn-based group operates within the intersecting practices of performance, music, and theater. They are concerned with simultaneity, complexity, and radicality, combining dense layers of text, notation, objects, and processes. They work to give audiences unconventional viewing experiences through a merging of theatricality and pedestrian activity. The company’s works upset habitual notions of time, pace, progression, and virtuosity, and value accumulation above cohesion.
Object Collection performances can take the shape of large-scale performance projects, experimental operas, and duo performances. Object Collection has premiered six original operas. Their work has toured to Norway, Denmark, the UK, Japan, Canada, Italy, and the US. Object Collection’s pieces have appeared in New York at La MaMa, Performance Space 122, Ontological Theater at St. Mark’s Church, National Sawdust, Chocolate Factory Theater, Abrons Arts Center, Invisible Dog Art Center, Roulette, and Issue Project Room, among others. Albums have been released on Slip Imprint, Infrequent Seams, and khalija. Object Collection has received extended profiles in Frieze magazine, Pitchfork, The Guardian, The Wire, BOMB, and on BBC Radio. www.objectcollection.us
