The anticipated new album from Marcus Whale has arrived, Nether out independently today via Blue Void. Available now on Bandcamp alongside bespoke CD and accompanying zine booklet. LISTEN + PURCHASE HERE + BUY TIX HERE.

Marcus Whale has long been known for his soaring, physical electronic music, leading listeners through dense club sounds with his angelic voice and intoxicating lyricism. On Nether, he reaches a state of disintegration, losing the edges of his form amongst dirt. This music is the playlist for a nightclub without walls, where the floor is a vast, hidden field. If eyes were able to focus, they might discern an arm or a mouth briefly gliding out of the mud. The further you step away, the more the sounds refract and echo across the landscape.

Writing to the culture of the underground, queer desire, colonial pasts and presents, Nether is 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.” what would it sound like when what is buried deep below reaches up and speaks its infernal voice? This deconstruction of the human and its ‘negative’ is the undercurrent to Marcus Whale’s new record.

Marcus explains “If there’s an ethic to Nether it’s to encourage myself and others in the world to forget what we know, shake off the restrictive security of a plan, of a fixed identity and embrace the otherness of the world as it comes to you, incomplete and mysterious. I’ve spent most of my life loving improvisation as a musician and a dancer, but also as a body in the world that must negotiate with others, and allow for these relations and encounters and contacts to shift and change me.”

Rife with cinematic tension – reflective of the breadth of his creative practice – desire, masochism, ritual, mystery, abound Nether. With influence from the film O Fantasma, the cues that form cruising and Nine Inch Nails at Woodstock 94, Marcus Whale presents the depth of his creative passion, manifested through figures of the un-dead. Or are they unborn? 

He continues, “I’m thinking of the ground, and of burial as an embodiment of what the human and social world attempts to exclude or repress or render forgotten.” Inspired by the cracks, the failures, the breakages and malfunctions that expose the fragility of orthodoxy. Musically set to enamour fans of LSDXOXO and Arca’s marriage of story and performance, later this month Marcus Whale will debut an all new live show experience in Melbourne, and Sydney in early August.

Indicative of his decade long creative practice, spread as wide as electronic music production, experimental and improvised performance to composition for stage, screen and classical musicians, this all new ghostly production is not one to be missed. Set to let audiences melt away the toxic sludge and give in to Marcus’ biggest inspiration – plain, unbridled, dance.