Stylistic constraints often allow for the greatest artistic freedom. Perhaps no one illustrates this better than The Body. Their discography resembles a collection of suicide notes: it is resigned through and through. A morass of harsh noise and power electronics that refuses any kind of catharsis. Noise distorted to the max, a-melodic synths and Chip King’s bloodcurdling screams swallow up any prospect of recovery. The Body is a body that suffocates under its own weight.
Interestingly, it is this claustrophobic confinement that seems to give the high school friends an enviable foresight. The Body have a reputation for being grateful collaborators. Some, like their collaboration with sludge anarchists Thou, are an intuitive ‘match made in hell’. Others are less obvious. Who would have thought that a collaboration with drone metallers Big│Brave would end in minimalist folk? A collaboration with experimental ambient singer Dis Fig? That Lee Buford would work with rapper Gangsta Boo or musique concrète composer Claire Rousay as part of his pitch-black side-project Sightless Pit? None of this was on my bingo card.
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This openness is inherent to The Body themselves. In 2016, the duo shocked traditionalists with ‘No One Deserves Happiness’, an attempt to combine harsh noise with pop. Buford explained to Bandcamp Daily that the album was due to their inner dynamic: “Chip either listens to conventional pop or undiluted noise. I give myself everything in between. The Body’s work is therefore a ‘back and forth’ between their tastes, and the intensity with which the duo crush different influences is frightening for the listener: ‘The Body are like a black hole – open to everything.
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