Limerick, Ireland’s Cinemartyr (originally OST) releases Death of The First Person on July 24. Cinemartyr’s latest nods to a variety of experimental rock heavies, including Fugazi, Arab on Radar, Death Grips, and the like, although primary composer Shane Harrington cites the band’s main current musical inspiration as more soundtrack-based, specifically mentioning the work of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Johann Johannsson as examples.
The band was formed by Harrington in 2012, before relocating to New York. To date, Cinemartyr has released four diverse-sounding albums. Invisible Ink For Sketching Ghosts, a somber experimental rock album, was released in February 2012, followed by Dreams During Hibernation in 2015. Cinemartyr’s third album, Uncaused, took on a more indie/folk approach and was released in 2016. Finally, Suffer New York Love, an album of ambient and noise experimentation came in 2017. The current lineup includes Shane Harrington (vocals, guitars), Amber Moon Voltson (vocals, guitars), Aaron CT (bass), and David Goldman (drums).
Death Of The First Person marks a very different stylistic change for Cinemartyr as they embrace a more primal, noise-rock driven sound with a new live line-up. It will be their fifth album. Cinemartyr is in many ways the culmination and result of a childhood forged amidst the gang feuds, burglaries, and stabbings of the Southill ghetto in Limerick City. Death Of The First Person continues to sublimate Harrington’s early brush with violence while also exploring themes more relevant to the artist’s current life: mental health, media, and noise as a philosophical concept.
Coinciding with the digital release, the band will be selling a limited-to-five BLOOD/PISS/CUM Bundle. Each pack will include “one vial of fluid extracted from the artist’s body, front and rear album art prints signed, numbered, and dated by the artist, hard copy, ink printed Death Of The First Person zine, a flash drive containing all ten tracks from the album in various formats, a signed letter from the artist, and digital download codes.” Each of the packages will have a different body fluid. Preorder, here.
Ghettoblaster has the pleasure of sharing “Run From Terror To Bring It Closer” today. Harrington said this about it:
This song title perfectly sums up my thoughts and feelings around the entire making of Death Of The First Person. The more you try and run away from the problems in your life, and the more you push down that voice that’s like ‘Man, I’m really freaked out and I’ve been trying to tell you about it for the last decade’ the more it comes at you, the more it clings. I guess a lot of it was this embrace or jumping into the process of ultimate discomfort. Turning around and having a conversation with the buggyman. That ‘buggyman’ means different things to different people.
I also just wanted to make a ripper. All the riffs in this song were created under this specific creative restriction I had put on the writing process at that time, which was: the body dictates the note. As in I wanted to only play parts that could not inhibit my body. It’s important for me, when playing live, to be able to move freely onstage, to dance. I usually feel like crap and consider it a terrible show if I just stand still for the set. Even if I played technically well. So all these riffs had to be physically intuitive to play and not stall me up as I performed. I found this to be a really exciting and fun way to decide what I’m allowed to keep and what I have to throw away. It made me focus on energy more than musicality. So, on that aforementioned idea of ultimate discomfort, here the physical and the mental stuff stopped being binaries and sort of met in the middle.
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