This is how you lose yourself. Fracture by fracture. Exactly as you are built. Because you were. You did not always exist. And even if you did, you were not always yourself. That is what Funeral Plain wants to get across with most of the choices they made with their latest album, Negation of Negation. Starting with the album cover, which is a painting done by artist Tim Foley. A painting is first and foremost a blank canvas until it is not. Until it becomes a painting. And this album cover is textured and turbid. Slanted lines start at what look like jagged peaks of mountaintops and reach up to the sky that is an apocalyptic shade of brown.
And you cannot help but find parallels between this scene of dissolution and the third song on the album, ‘decomposition’ which Jonny Gill explained to me marks “a transformation. As if the process of becoming is reversing and you are losing yourself,” referring to the first chorus, “I become unbecome.” On the second verse of the same song, the lyrics also dehumanize, “But we were both just vessels for another,” and regress identity to vials of default human properties like blood and thought. The song thrusts you into convulsions of distorted rhythm guitar and flagellations of a simple drumbeat that punctuates the guitar riffs. Perhaps a subtle reassurance that some kind of order still exists in this upheaval of transformation.
A sentiment that is lacking from the Galaxie 500-sounding opening song, ‘encounter,’ with its unnervingly consistent, steady-eye-contact percussion and thorny guitars, this one portends a rift straight after a face-off and sure enough, the vocals sound garbled and incomprehensible and what you can discern from them sounds like it is drifting away, but the lyrics are recounting an interaction that as Jonny Gill said to me, “leads to one decomposing the composition of the other.” Through the guitar pedal that invokes peals of belligerent, gusty wind eddied to induce obstruction, the process of disintegration commences, and the riffs that weave through these rackets to a clearing disprove what Jonny said to be “a false perception of separateness.”
Though Funeral Plain does deliberately try to impose a sense of alienation on the listener on this album, like on ‘subliminal transformations,’ an instrumental song that is ensconced in the middle of the album, with dilating and contracting synths that give off the impression of a fish-eye lens in the form of music. There is an announcement of sorts that is spoken over the song, but it is indecipherable, which adds to the uneasiness this track coaxes out of your senses. Towards the end, the synths ripple and swirl, then pulsate until they wind down to a stop, an imitation of something human petering out into diminishment.
And “It’s all change, ever more of the same, I have no name,” as he says on the second track, ‘you know (I have a feeling as If I have forgotten something)’ also references the cessation of any kind of imitation since names are things we share with others. How do we know we are not acting like the other person named the same as us? How much of our character is authentic if our names cannot be original? And how is it that we are stuck with one name while we constantly change into different beings? The strumming at the beginning makes it sound buoyant, but the synth wails, sounding like someone screaming in monotone, a pain you are used to that still hurts. “Always never the same,” he says, which is descriptive of something that is not simply different; it is indicative of something that is stagnant in its vagaries. Predictable in its occurrence, unpredictable in its effects.
The last three songs are three beats of the same story. “Nothing’s seen,” on ‘dissociation (I)’ is in direct conversation with “I see nothing,” on ‘acceptance (III)’ even though one is passive and the other active, which is befitting because the one that is passive is referent to dissociating and the one that is active refers to accepting that you cannot see anything. When I asked Jonny Gill what inspired him and Colin Faust to make this album, he said, “The book Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, which gave us the names of the last two tracks.” That is quite palpable as the album as a whole exemplifies a sci-fi, close-encounter kind of story with the twist that the creature you are coming into contact with and confronting, maybe even combating, is yourself. And the raucous instrumentation on this record is a manifestation of that friction between the self and the being that is being palpated. This is how you lose yourself. And it is only then that you realize who you are is what you have lost.
Written by Leo August
