JG Thirlwell is an influential composer/producer/performer based in Brooklyn, who also works under many pseudonyms including Manorexia, Steroid Maximus, Foetus, Baby Zizanie, Clint Ruin and Wiseblood.
If there is a common thread to his varied musical styles, it is a dramatic intensity and an evocative, cinematic quality. Thirlwell is also featured as producer or remixer on a wide variety of artist recordings, including releases for artists as diverse as Nine Inch Nails, Excepter, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Lydia Lunch,Coil, Z's, and Swans. JG has completed commissions for Kronos Quartet, Bang On A Can and LEMUR and is also a member of the "freq_out" sound-art collective, who create on-site sound and light installations. JG performs live with a chamber version of his Manorexia project, and also scores "The Venture Brothers", a cartoon on Adult Swim/Cartoon Network.
His most recent release is the Manorexia 5.1 surround sound album "Dinoflagellate Blooms".
DINOFLAGELLATE BLOOMS features eleven compositions composed, produced and performed by Manorexia aka JG Thirlwell. Begun in Berlin in 2005, and completed in 2011. The album was recorded at Thirlwell's Self Immolation studios in Brooklyn, and the 5.1 mixes were made at Harvestworks Studio with Paul Geluso. The album follows the release of last year's acclaimed Mesopelagic Waters on John Zorn's Tzadik label, which was performed by Manorexia as a chamber ensemble.
The album kicks off with Cryogenics, featuring the album's sole guest contributor, percussionist Kenny Wolleson. Hammered and plucked autoharp and piano strings weave with small percussion to suggest a delicate hypnotic ritual.
The second track, Anabiosis, was originally commissioned by the Bang On A Can People's Commissioning fund in 2005. This is a bombastic fleshed-out symphonic version of the piece. We next encounter the haunting, slightly demented Ten Ton Shadow.
Krzystl (pronounced "Crystal") was originally conceived as a four channel installation in the Tou Scene museum in Norway. It grew from some of JG's desire to exploit some of the sounds and atmospheres he had created in some of his sound design work. It is a disturbing, ominous sonic portrait that builds to an terrifying crescendo.
A Plastic Island in the Pacific is a melancholic but intense meditation using distressed and distorted clouds of chords, dedicated to the huge deposit of garbage in the Pacific ocean which is the size of the state of Texas.
The Perfect Patsy is a suspenseful, brooding and compelling track full of mystery and pregnant tension. The interlude Hoarse Platitudes is a field recording made in Havana, Cuba on the occasion of Castro's return to the city after a long illness. Bells and resonant chiming dominate Vika, which rests on a plaintive, haunting string pattern.
Kinaesthesia began life as a four channel installation piece accompanying Norwegian artist Anne Senstad's color projections. The piece with JG's accompaniment has shown in numerous museums around the world and the audio is reworked and released here for the first time. Its a transportative, evolving piece which invokes inner and outer space.
The final track, Struck, refers to the struck piano strings which form the initial basis of the song, which builds to an intense and jagged symphonic shockmare before releasing into an ominous and brooding coda whioch closes the album's exhausting journey.
A dinoflagellate is a small plankton-like aquatic creature. "Dinoflagellate blooms" is the term for when the dinoflagellate create an algae that turns the surface of the sea red.
For more info please visit www.foetus.org
(photo by Marylene Mey)