According to Metal Mother’s Facebook page, band interests include “Transdimentional pursuits, psychic collaboration, risky business, nature, machines, mutant lyfe.”
Her (Oakland-based Taara Tati) video for “Mind_Off” will help you picture exactly what those interests entail. Disintegrating baby sumo wrestlers? Check. A cracked out Jell-O feast? Also in there.The track is off Metal Mother’s debut album, IONIKA, which sounds like Grimes at Burning Man. Tati’s high-pitched voice, commanding yet friendly, preaches alien sermons over a variety of convoluted, beat driven instrumental tracks.
Metal Mother is part of the “Post Primal Collective,” a bay area group of artists who seem intent on exploring every fucked up and awesome corner of the human consciousness. Their output doesn’t seem aimed at making it big at all, and rather at collaborating and performing for arts sake. I can only imagine what one of their parties would be like.
As a generation of jobless intellectuals and artists collide with the reality of urban rent, I expect many such experimental collectives to gain prominence in the coming years. Thank god. Often, these groups produce the most cutting edge work and truly drive cultural narritaves without meaning to. They are wellsprings of inspiration, affecting every person who stumbles across their work. Whether you like Japanese wood block-style S&M portraits or not, they’re likely to stick in your brain for a while.
I feel the same way about “Mind_Off.” Nothing groundbreaking here, but rather an extension on a theme, a successor to Fever Ray in some ways. This song finds its way to the back of your brain, and flickers to life as the lights dim, its haunting drums leading you into a darker dream than you may have expected.