Music fanatics express their devotion in myriad ways. Some travel the country, carving a path in a band’s shadow; some join fan clubs, form cover bands, or get tattoos. But the New York-based group Object Collection spun their obsession with Fugazi into something far more idiosyncratic, distilling sounds from Fugazi’s extensive live archive—guitar noodling, audience noise, and stage banter—into a challenging, cacophonous, 100-minute “opera-in-suspension.” It's called It’s All True, and the live performance is something to behold: big lamps, balloons, and jerky, improvised choreography all work together in service of preserving Fugazi’s ethos and aura.
Stage renditions of It's All True will be performed on an upcoming tour, but leading up to that, Slip is releasing an album version on October 6. It's a pretty a disorienting listen: Opener “Introduction” and its soundcheck-esque guitar and drum noise could, theoretically, be the intro for any live album, but this familiarity is upended at the beginning of the next track, when a voice inexplicably screams out, “It could be so much fucking fun!” The rest of the the tracks follow this tumultuous pattern, with the indelible voices occasionally bleeding through, most notably Guy Piciotto’s infamous dealing with a heckler: “Ice cream-eating motherfucker…that’s what you are…” the snippet is surrounded with clanging noise, and makes his out-of-context rant all the more striking.
“All of us were both blown away and disoriented by the work—it was well beyond anything we had anticipated when agreeing to Travis’ early request,” Fugazi’s Guy Piciotto said in a statement to Object Collection. “We feel moved by Object Collection’s engagement with our archive material and salute everyone involved for their hard work and patience and for wrestling with such integrity with our sounds and words.”
Check out the stream of It’s All True below.
