If it seems hypocritical that Glasgow’s standard quo rejectionists, Outblinker, renounce fame in a press release — a tool to increase a band’s exposure so they become, well, more famous — so be it. Nothing really matters anyway. After all, as they write, “Your ashes are gradually diluted by a planet of dirt and your music even more rapidly subsumed by the white noise of the world.”
Admittedly, it would take quote a lot of white noise to subsume the ulcer-inducing synthesizer screeches, serrated guitars, and speed-metal drum rolls rending apart the fabric of “Farrokh Bulsara,” a.k.a. the birth name of Freddie Mercury. Co-produced by Benjamin John Power of gnarly noisemakers Fuck Buttons (and who late last year released a new EP under his other project, Blanck Mass, led by “The Great Confuso”) the instrumental track comes with a fittingly hefty treatise:
Farrokh Bulsara died in 1991 on the same day and in the same exact instant as Freddie Mercury. His signature doesn’t retail daily for thousands of pounds even though it came from the same hand. When fame and celebrity cleaved Farrokh Bulsara in twain, he watched this surreal, new creation propagate across the planet and ultimately well beyond his own mortality. Farrokh Bulsara is dead. Freddie Mercury was never really alive.
Delving deeper into the absurdities of celebrity, mortality and the futility of art addressed on new EP, The Remains of Walter Peck, “Farrokh Bulsara” is a Frankenstein-like musical creation, assembled from live drum takes, experimental electronics and vocal improvisations from Outblinker’s now-infamous recording sessions on a remote island in Orkney: a landscape peppered with the carcasses of vehicles, animals and even burial grounds older than the pyramids. Is it any wonder that this ghostly setting led to the group musing on the bigger questions of life?
These strewn musical limbs were then reassembled into the brooding, melancholic monster you now hear, thanks in no small way to the jaded vision and sharp surgical tools of producer Benjamin John Power.
Listen to the song below, and check out their forthcoming EP, The Remains of Water Peck, out via Stabbed In The Back Records on May 7.
