Collapse Culture — Drag Your Coffin My Lord

Ian Miller and Graham Scala (aka Collapse Culture) have no business making a dance record – but they did it anyway, and it’s great for it. Miller and Scala move in non-electro circles primarily, which is what gives Collapse Culture its charming, sometimes brutally comic, naivete. Like outside art for electronic music, or something..

The two have collaborated once before, but it was nothing quite as ambitious and skewed as Drag Your Coffin My Lord. Imagine a sci-fi thriller, where the plot essentially revolves around two well-worn punks who are suddenly faced with the task of saving the planet from alien invaders- if they successfully create a dance record that no one can actually dance to. The heroes are forced into a production studio with only electronic instruments and must stay on task, for the accidental creation of a repeatable, danceable groove, could signal the destruction of life as we know it.

This may sound a bit melodramatic, but it’s the closest I could come to a proper description of the appropriative chaos that is to be found on Drag Your Coffin My Lord – is thrown together synths, drum machines and Casio keyboards elements – which are more of a collection of songs than a proper, organic (or non-organic?) whole, the tracks’ tentacles part of a larger maw of inter-planetary struggle; or, capitalism. We get a few, proper bass lines on the final cut, “Dead Mall Blues (Negative Epiphanies and Necropolitics)”, but mostly the album hovers on the impossible precipice between imitation and parody – the DNA of any good comedic undertaking. Other, similarly cumbersome titles, populate the release – my favourite is “Nuclear Semiotics (Superstructure Collapse)” – which keeps the absurdity of naming such pieces as ripe as a punchbowl.

For fans of meta-dance (is that even a thing?), and for those heavy rockers who are seeking proof of the beautiful afterlives of amateurism, having long left the world of the stringed instruments behind.