Fuck Death is a record named after a Leon Golub painting, an American painter I admire very much.
The record is an attempt to make something about Beauty and War. I have very little experience with these concepts.
This is not a political record, though I suspect those will be coming soon enough.
It took three years to make, which, I admit, is a long time to make a record.
Here are some influences and inspirations that helped me work through this one:
The Book of Job; Michael Herr’s Dispatches; this Russian film called Come and See; 80’s Vietnam films employing 60’s guitar sounds to sweep us back into that era; the awesomeness of Platoon to the ten-year old mind; Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia; Kraftwerk; Fuzz; Brownface Princeton tremolo; Wind sounds; Cosmic Sounds; Death Sounds; Archilochus’ fragments; Iraq; Cheerleaders; Chinese soldier poems, and Shawn MacDonald’s mountain photos, cloud-and-sky-and-stone images that I returned to many times while constructing the record.
The record is a sibling to the last Blackout Beach record, Skin of Evil. But the longing in Fuck Death is not romantic; these are deserter’s songs, coward’s songs. I am all for reassessing cowardice. The most important lyric on Fuck Death is “run away”. It’s a bit heavy, especially because the dominant 2011 story is that kids want to live on an invisible beach within their hearts and party this stuff away. But not all kids scorn uneasiness. And not all music is made for kids.
I recorded Fuck Death myself, which might be a 2011 thing to do; by that I mean that this record could not have been made with anyone else, anywhere else. I used three synthesizers (two mono, one poly), two drum machines, and one guitar amplifier. Megan Boddy sings with me on most of the songs. I thank her for that. — Carey Mercer, Blackout Beach