{"id":37301,"date":"2021-08-01T17:15:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-01T21:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cultureaddicts.com\/?p=37301"},"modified":"2021-08-01T08:52:11","modified_gmt":"2021-08-01T12:52:11","slug":"lice-share-new-video-for-persuader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cultureaddicts.com\/?p=37301","title":{"rendered":"LICE share new video for \u2018Persuader\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Bristol group LICE reveal their new video for Persuader<\/em> – lifted from their debut album\u00a0\u2018WASTELAND: What Ails Our People Is Clear\u2019\u00a0\u2013 released January 8th, 2021 via their own label Settled Law Records. This is accompanied by new b-side Mediator<\/em>: an avant-garde re-working of Persuader<\/em>\u00a0drawing influence from the likes of Wim Mertens\u2019\u00a0Struggle For Pleasure\u00a0<\/em>and Xiu Xiu.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018WASTELAND: What Ails Our People Is Clear\u2019 is a concept album advancing a new model for satirical music, in which implicit bias\/ social iniquity is interrogated through character-driven narratives. A wild Burroughsian adventure story populated with time-travellers, shape-shifters and ectoplasmic spectres, this album was also published as a standalone piece of short fiction. Featuring an \u2018Intonarumori\u2019 (noise instrument) hand-built by the band, based on the 100 year-old designs of Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo, it also features guest appearances from Katy J Pearson and Goat Girl\u2019s Clottie Cream & Holly Hole. Issued as a Dinked Edition (entering the UK Official Record Stores Chart at No.11),\u00a0\u2018WASTELAND\u2019 emerged to enormous acclaim from the likes of The Quietus, CRACK, Uncut, Classic Rock, Dork, The Financial Times, NARC, CLASH and more, as well as radio support from 6Music, Radio 1, Radio X and KEXP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018WASTELAND\u2019\u00a0takes us to a strange liminal space known as The Wasteland, ephemerally populated with half-conscious people from the real world. A vigilante known as The Conveyor exposes a plot to engineer humanity\u2019s self-destruction, helmed by the shadowy R.D.C. and its flamboyant, misanthropic leader Dr Coehn. As a cat-and-mouse chase unfolds, The Wasteland\u2019s populace experience strange incidents and transformations \u2013 the prose text itself warping into cut-ups, soliloquies and even plays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Persuader<\/em>, The Conveyor reveals that he was once friends with Dr Coehn, and was in fact responsible for setting this once-idealistic figure on his current path of destruction. The Conveyor then unsuccessfully attempts to change Dr Coehn\u2019s mind again, employing the analogy of a deadly virus: lines conceived and recorded mere months before the coronavirus pandemic. The exchange in \u2018Persuader\u2019 explores our power to influence each other\u2019s outlooks, and argues that art satirising human iniquity must come from a place of hopefulness for our betterment (rather than empty misanthropy). In this, The Conveyor represents\u00a0\u2018WASTELAND\u2019\u00a0in conversation with LICE\u2019s more Swiftian earlier EPs\u00a0\u2018It All Worked Out Great 1+2\u2019. The counting sequence at the end, inspired by Philip Glass\u2019 opera \u2018Einstein On The Beach\u2019, represents the stable passage of time. This ends a motif in the album\u2019s first half, in which jumbled numerical sequences (heard in the right headphone) reflect disruptions to space-time in The Wasteland.

The video was created by animator Tasha Lizak, who says: \u201cThe video is framed around the concept of a(n) research\/experiment centred around the decoding and destruction of mankind. Constructing and deconstructing a biomechanics \u2018man\u2019, the video follows a process of analysis and decoding. The central icon, a \u2018cypher\u2019, constructed around the idea of 4 constructs of humanity: (i)BELONGING, (ii)PURPOSE, (iii)STORYTELLING, (iv)TRANSCENDENCE, with a core figure, representing the \u2018idea\u2019 of a perfect human, a perfect sample of data. The video tracks the development of the \u2018research\u2019, navigating through constructed \u2018labs\u2019 and test areas, whilst images glaze the screen. The abundance of imagery, which creates the skeleton of the \u2018cypher\u2019 and \u2018research\u2019, repeat and twist, verging on spam, allude to a certain \u2018soft zone\u2019 state that is an inherent weakness of \u2018mankind\u2019. Loops and repetitions of image cycles feel familiar with a compulsive behaviour of time spent engorging on social media, streaming sites, pornography etc etc, eliciting a sense of movement whilst caught in stagnation. The video plays of this idea of stasis, through the idea of cyclical repletion and the illusion of progress, perhaps the core error encoded in the contemporary binary.\u201d<\/em> Watch the Persuader<\/em> video clip via YouTube below. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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