Reported by Carcassbomb
Quotes by Gautier Serre are from the press release
As many of you have already heard, Igorrr is releasing a new album on March 27th, titled Spirituality And Distortion via Metal Blade. If you haven’t seen the video, then do yourself a favor and check it out below my late night ramblings about how much I love this project.
If you aren’t familiar with Igorrr and you’re open to experimental music, then boy have you got one hell of a journey ahead of you through their backlog. Igorrr is the ultimate one man band, created by Gautier Serre, a French musical genius. When I say musical genius I mean it on the level that I consider Mike Patton a mastermind of experimentation. Something tells me Patton would look up to Igorrr, the new generation of weird ass music that makes no sense to most, makes sense to a few and I don’t think is meant to make sense to anyone by Serre himself as a form of self-expression. Supposedly he has synesthesia, a rare condition in which someone is able to perceive music as colors. As he says about this new album: “Life is not only one color. These 14 tracks are a journey through different states of mind I’ve been through.”.
To put it plainly, Igorrr is an avant garde metal adjacent project that incorporates everything from baroque, electronic, glitch-hop, metal, jazz, swing and whatever sounds tickle his fancy on a creative level. He then mashes them all together with a blistering speed and vocal performances that can be as peaceful as choir boy or as violent and guttural as the best of death metal vocalists.
The range that occurs not just within his discography, but even within in each individual track is immense. The fact that it is as coherent as it is, is something so many people have failed to do in the past within avant garde music which is often messy. This is like Aphex Twin as experienced by a Florida Man on bath salts. Some of his work is comparable to going to church on acid. There’s no normal sense of mind or safety here.
“Getting stuck in only one emotion is very boring to me; life is a wide range of emotions – sometimes you’re happy, sometimes you’re sad, angry, pissed off, nostalgic or blown away,”
Only fucking Igorrr could have a video like this, that is somewhere between Garry’s Mod and Marvel Studio CGI. It’s a headfuck that even after many albums and fresh ideas, it still manages to profoundly affect me in unpredictable and provocative ways. There’s no way going into this video, to know where it will go or why, just like the music. This is the only track currently available from the new album and it’s got me very excited for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, among the many contributors to Igorrr’s discography, this newest album is going to have vocals from GEORGE ‘CORPSEGRINDER’ FISCHER, you know, the better Cannibal Corpse vocalist (Come at me bro). “We had the honor to welcome my personal favorite musical hero on this album: George ‘Corpsegrinder’ Fisher of Cannibal Corpse. He screams on the track ‘Parpaing’, and his legendary voice brings the heaviness this track deserved. George is like the final boss of death metal. Like on a video game you have the final boss who is the strongest, George is the best in death metal singing. Due to the extreme heaviness and violence of his voice, I found it very much coherent to contrast it with a cheap tune of 8bit music which is the least heavy music on earth. The contrast is beautiful to my ears.”
Secondly, it seems to be that Igorrr is retaining it’s signature hyper-glitch electronic sound but combining elements that reflect the current alternative and metal scene, towards the end of the song in the video, “Very Noise”, it basically becomes tech death. I expect this album will bring a lot of influence from current genres into it’s esoteric and varied sound catalogue. Considering the majority of his work is merging very old classical musical styles with modern electronic and metal, it would not surprise me if the modern elements would be updated. Perhaps we will hear less of the old and more of the “recent old” blended with the right now.
Spirituality And Distortion track-listing
1. Downgrade Desert
2. Nervous Waltz
3. Very Noise
4. Hollow Tree
5. Camel Dancefloor
6. Parpaing
7. Musette Maximum
8. Himalaya Massive Ritual
9. Lost in Introspection
10. Overweight Poesy
11. Paranoid Bulldozer Italiano
12. Barocco Satani
13. Polyphonic Rust
14. Kung-Fu Chèvre
Pre orders available now: metalblade.com/Igorrr
Have a good go of the backlog:
might as well start with the second “demo” from 2008, Moisissure, an album I discovered when I was 18 and was my entry point into all this madness while I was in a big Mr Bungle/Melvins/Butthole Surfers binge and thirsted for something even crazier. Well I found it.
Here is forged the origin of the Igorrr sound and it’s as fresh today as it was over a decade ago. Pointed experimentation. I didn’t quite grasp it myself when I heard it, it was when Nostril came out two years later that Igorrr became cemented in my mind as something to cherish, that there was actually something happening here that wasn’t happening anywhere else.
Don’t ask me who does the art, I don’t know. For all I know it could be some dead artist brought back to life to be flown into Igorrr’s studio. This album furthered the sound of the demos into new extremes. Which I think afterwards, he started to feel like he might be becoming too concrete, too expected.
In 2012 was the release of Hallelujah, which of all his albums was the most difficult for me to penetrate but I eventually did and it became harmonious in some weird chaotic way. Here we hear a lot more Opera and minimalism, even a larger attention span within the presentation of the ideas. It wasn’t so “metal” and felt less aggressive and instead being intensely fluid. There were more cleaner elements like spanish guitars, rattles and various strings.
This is his most expressive work on a sort of melody/melancholy level. It’s like a double speed “Mondo Cane”, I think collaboration became a big part of the project here as well as Serre’s talent for bringing the collaborations together in a way that had a strong synergy, he is a digital wizard master person.
Then there was a break, and why not? After these three albums he had every right to just mic drop that shit indefinitely and he’d still be considered significant as a composer now anyway. None of his work is defined by a time in music as much as his work rewinds and redefines music through time, providing new contexts for it. In 2017 came Savage Sinusoid. This album is the newest, both in terms of date and in terms of my familiarity. I missed this when it first came out somehow and entered it last year.
I still haven’t fully digested this one myself but I am hearing a fixation on singular sounds more than before. When Serre likes the sound of something, he seems to play with it for a bit longer, mutating it rather than alternating it. Sometime long enough to actually let a sound fade out. This has the strongest vocal performances yet with the opening “clean but guttural” vocal style that gives me goosebumps. This is a pleasing album as an Igorrr fan, putting it at 4/4 for me in terms of explored discography.
So there’s the news, a thinly veiled discography overview, got ya! Made you listen to me like when I talk for too long to one person at a party who clearly wants to go mingle.
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