Body Meat, the alias of singer, songwriter and producer Chris Taylor, announces the release of his debut album Starchris, out 23rd August on Partisan Records. Partly influenced by the storytelling and intricate world-building potential of video games, the album follows a transformative hero’s journey from start to finish across 13 songs. He charts a trajectory through cut-scene-like moments and bosses of various difficulty levels, leading toward an ultimate moment of self-realisation and peace. Mixing IDM, club music, experimental pop, trap, footwork and metal, Body Meat blends those edges with exhilarating results. He also unveils new single ‘High Beams’, the album’s trap-inflected first-level boss fight where pop melodies collide with waves of nu-metal.
Speaking on the track, he shares:
“‘High Beams’ is about a programmer anxiously creating a game from within a cave. He codes all of the functionality, the rules and physics – every parameter to his liking. He then tries to instantiate himself into this world as a copy, but an oversight within his sloppy code work creates a bug within it. His instantiated copy is unable to be removed and begins hunting him. The programmer, terrified, tries to destroy the copy of himself. Nothing he does can stop the copy from moving towards him. He starts to realise he has done this before: the copy remembers him and knows that he has to warn the programmer who is cursed to write this code over and over again. Only the bugged copy can break the cycle.”
Since creating the moniker in 2016, Chris Taylor’s releases as Body Meat have functioned like distinct musical sandboxes with different dimensions and house rules establish each one. Taking inspiration from early stints in Denver art-rock bands, Taylor’s music as Body Meat is rooted in piecing together the debris in the aftermath of unpredictable genre clashes and making sense of them. His singular blend of trap production and Ethiopian / funk music on his two previously released EPs Truck Music (2019) and Year of the Orc (2021) existed in a plane all of their own.
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