Their Bellies Full of Sand by Speak Onion is today’s featured track from THE ENTERTAINMENT. Relentless and reckless, shot through post-industrial wreckage, Their Bellies Full of Sand is a fine introduction to Speak Onion’s oeuvre.
Below, see Speak Onion’s answers to our questions about the track, music-making, and his approach to sound. Stay tuned, all the contributors to THE ENTERTAINMENT will be featured here in the coming weeks.
1) Tell us a bit about your contribution to The Entertainment. Is it typical of your music? Are there any sounds/processes/elements in it that you haven’t included before? Were you trying to go for any specific listener reaction?
The raw materials are pretty typical: cut-up breakbeat like thing, heavy kicks, modulated bass, feedbacky noise, dark melodic thing. The tempo is much lower than most of what I do, though. For a (brief) period during the development of this track I was wondering about whether I could make something more “dance-y” even something that a DJ could use in a club situation. I never dove all the way into that, but some of the patterns still bear that mark.
I’m definitely better off in the creation of my music than I am in regular life: even when it’s frustrating it’s exciting; there’s (almost) nothing that’s completely out of my control; I eventually get somewhere good. Once the music is complete, though, I think it’s a much worse place than my regular life. It’s kind of a bummer, actually. No fun, no smiles.
Noise is absence of order, and you can extend that to say it’s the absence of intention. I introduce a lot of literal noise into my music, and then spend time fighting that noise off to reassert intention/order. That’s one of my primary tension-building techniques.
No. I want people to feel a very concrete connection to the music and feel they know it very intimately. Not on the first or even second listen, probably, but eventually. I want them to experience “Their Bellies Full of Sand” as a world they can inhabit directly. I want it to feel real for them.
Come see me play a show in Brooklyn on March 20 at Coco66 for Barcore, and look out for a full length album coming this year.
Thanks, Speak Onion. If you’re anywhere near N.Y.C. on the 20th, make sure to go see the show. Guaranteed to have more beats per minute than anywhere else in the world. True density, unbridled energy.
-Derek Tibs (CEO, Immigrant Breast Nest)
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