Toronto duo Intensive Care (Andrew Nolan and Ryan Bloomer) and Rhode Island duo The Body (Chip King and Lee Buford) are innovative forces in extreme music. Now, these four musicians have joined forces for the brilliant collaborative album Was I Good Enough?, incoming March 14 on Closed Casket Activities [pre-order]. With glitchy, bellowing vocals and an icy industrial backbone, these eight tracks showcase the respective pedigrees of their creators while summoning a dynamic and dangerous beast through the distortion.
“Our motivations are very similar,” Ryan Bloomer says. “This collaboration made sense because we weren’t necessarily bringing anything separate; it seemed like we were bringing two sides together in order to make a bigger whole. At the same time, we didn’t repeat ourselves. You’re going to hear two guitar-based bands who didn’t use much guitar at all on this. It’s a largely electronic album, but it sounds as heavy as any guitar-based music I’ve ever done.”
Andrew Nolan continues, “‘At Death’s Door’ was mixed and road tested on a full dub sound system and subsequently remixed when we discovered the mastering was unable to work with both the low tuning on the guitars and the sub bass at the same time in the loud parts of the song. Notable instruments used: a shopping cart, a push mower, a set of bed springs.” He concludes, “The video is by skintape, a video artist, beat maker, and camera designer from North Carolina and was filmed in an abandoned chicken rendering plant.“
The union of Intensive Care and The Body dates back to a tour in 2018 but the idea for a collaboration remained on the backburner until 2021. The Body established the framework for the album and shared it with Intensive Care, and all four musicians tinkered with it for the next year-and-a-half. Lee from The Body comments, “What started as years and years of admiration both musically and personally has led to us convincing IC into making our love into a concrete physical release.” Bloomer says the collaboration was “based on our friendship and appreciation for The Body’s approach—which is quite similar to ours.” He continues, “In a conventional sense, we’re both grounded in heavy music. We all try to transcend the boundaries of the genre and redefine what heavy means to us.”
They did so by adopting a production technique widely used in hip-hop and originally popularized in Houston: chopped and screwed.They combined samples, instrumentals, drum loops, vocals, and other elements into a corrosive and caustic collage. “We took what The Body gave us and ran with it,” Bloomer recalls. “We were deliberately slowing parts down and doubling up to emphasize certain vocal lines. Hip-hop was a huge inspiration. We tried to lean on those techniques in order to create this record and put our own spin on it.” He concludes, “There’s a real contrast between our voices. You really hear the back-and-forth of two bands who have come together to make a record.”
Pre-order Was I Good Enough?here and look for more news and singles from Intensive Care + The Body to arrive soon.
Was I Good Enough?, cover art:
Was I Good Enough?, track listing:
Mandelbrot Anamnesis Mistakes Have Been Made Swallowed by the God The Misunderstanding At Death’s Door The Riderless Mount Cartography of Suffering Unwanted
