Marcus Whale shares new single + video ‘Unborn’ from forthcoming Nether LP (July 2)
PRAISE FOR Marcus Whale
“Creative juggernaut”
“Submerged in tenderness, divinity and devotion, Marcus uses music to transplant a feeling of elevation”
“Marcus Whale's singular music spans popular and classical forms to expose the monstrous transcendence of desire”
“An arresting, physically annihilating performance that incorporated song, dance and an extreme range of stillness and frenetic action”
“For Marcus Whale, an album is not just an assemblage of songs, but a total, considered project: music, performance, costume, visuals”
TRACKLIST
Nether
Unborn
Extra Life
Dark Room
Coil
Hide
Descending
Under The Skin
Underworld
Cascade
‘Unborn‘ is out now, buy/stream it here.
Revealing the second taste of his forthcoming record Nether, out on July 2, Marcus Whale today shares ‘Unborn’ with new music video by Tom Denize. LISTEN HERE + WATCH HERE + PRE-ORDER LP HERE.
A through line to Nether’s narrative impetus, ‘Unborn’ pedals with heavy vibrations, spiralling downwards through its dominating bassline. Indicative of his core musical DNA, influenced by late 2000s bass music and the invigorating inspiration of the inhibitionless dancefloor. ‘Unborn’, Marcus explains, “imagines feeling a vibration from below my feet, a call to crack open the earth and take a look below the surface. The fantasy is of dissolving into the collective flesh of the dead and buried, becoming “unborn” by returning to the soil.”
WATCH: ‘Unborn’ (Official Video)
Where Whale’s forthcoming album Nether edges on the paranormal with seductive and kinetic instrumentation, he continues, “Unborn is about wanting to be rid of your form and your identity in exchange for being subsumed into a greater and more infernal whole. In zombie movies, the hordes of reanimated corpses come as a wave with almost a hive mind, evoking the fear of the heathens, fear of a monstrous other that can’t be repressed.”
Written in the wake of a 37-hour music marathon known as Absorbed – “I had to go home and make some 140BPM music” – ‘Unborn’ visually manifests with a creature wading through a cavernous tunnel, hypnotically buoyed by its coiling time signature. “It’s a bit of a tribute to how it feels to be right in front of a subwoofer’, shaking you from your feet up pushing shimmering air all over you,” Marcus continues.
Nether wonders “what it sounds like when what’s below the ground reaches up out of its borders and speaks its infernal voice.” Musically set to enamour fans of Kelela to FKA twigs, Marcus Whale presents the depth of his creative passion, writing to the culture of the underground, queer desire, colonial pasts and presents – It’s a record that rattles with instrumentation, fighting against nescience, delirium, and emotional madness; what Whale calls “the surface world and its norms that attempt to repudiate and exclude.”
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