Artwork by: Philip Muller
We’re happy to be back with our GUESTMIXES series, collecting mixed selections from producers, djs and artists we love from all over the world. For the 50th entry, we present to you a mixtape from no less than Swan Meat aka Reba Fay from Washington, D.C., a poet, audio engineer, composer, RinseFM resident, Bala Club member, patch and plug-ins coder, and much much more. Her work could be described as an undefined and undefinable crossover body of various art forms, contorting itself by means of art music, complex compositions, pop-culture reference, cute-slash-creepy imagery, and straight-to-the-bone sound terrorism.
She released in 2016 her debut EP on the Paris-based Permalnk outcome: called Bounty, the record was composed by four tracks ranging from wicked grime to bass music, from sound collage to experimental poetry via hilarious Butthole Surfers samples and choral singing. While Bounty reportedly explored the process of recovery from bulimia experienced through the lens of Samus Aran, a character of the Metroid videogame series, her last work Tame EP, out late November for Kamixlo’s seminal netlabel Bala Club, directly investigates more into compositions of dynamic rhythmic progressions and distorted voices. Swan Meat primarily draws influence from the impact of the chronic illness which directly affected the artist’s life.
“My experience growing up in-&-out of hospitals as a young person has directly informed the way I process & make sound. For some time, the cold & the clinical were my norms. It’s hard to shake this vocabulary” [via]
Through her music, Reba summons the ideas of a filthy, grotesque body made of wicked flesh, and the grandeur of the blinding light scattered from a heavenly being – Swan Meat, indeed. In this sense, her fucking unpredictable, sample-layered compositions of industrial bursting noises, sudden rhythm changes, and pitched vocals are the closest things ever to an accurate description of what being human precisely means, on the outside as well as on the inside. Gut-spilling desire, inescapable nothingness, blood, and feathers.
Follow Swan Meat on Soundcloud, Facebook, and Instagram. Recommended discography: FUCKING EVERYTHING. Push the button!
TRACKLIST
swan meat – puppy breath (qualiatik vocal flip)
castelvania: lament of innocence – aria of nightmare
nunu ft. dj – scum 6
swan meat & djh – ???? ++ swan meat poetry
i hate models – pray for lust
bonaventure – impetus (swan meat remix)
swan meat – thru the towers
alexmalism – junk
AIROD – molekular distortion
ic3peak – tabletki (chaika remix)
dj hein – energetic rhythm (donkey rollers remix)
alex compton – heaven drop
PVKJ – tings i’d do
no doubt – don’t speak (hbZ bounce)
martin garrix – scared to be lonely (major conspiracy edit)
OBI – girls love techno (malice bootleg)
teska – road trip
shmirlap – only goat can judge me
gyorgy ligeti – musica ricercata
serial experiments lain theme (boa – duvet)
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We are a non-profit organization registered in December 2018, operating since late 2015 as a webzine and media website. In early 2017, we started our own event series focused on arts, experimental, and dancefloor-oriented music. We reject every invocation to “the Future” meant as the signifier for capitalistic “progress” and “innovation”, fully embracing the Present instead; we renounce any reckless and ultimately arbitrary division between “high” and “low”, respectable and not respectable, “mind” and “body”; we support and invite musicians, artists, and performers having diverse backgrounds and expressing themselves via variegated artistic practices.