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Purchase: bit.ly/austyn-wohlers-bodymelt
Catalog #: GN76
August 14, 2024
CASS+DIGI

As a member of Tomato Flower, Austyn Wohlers creates free-range art-pop that’s littered with atonal tendencies, rhythmic detours, and emotional indulgences for a wholly listenable barrage of sound. Now, the Baltimore-via-Atlanta musician, composer, and author joins the Geographic North family with ‘Bodymelt in the Garden of Death’, a richly enigmatic affair that explores harrowingly relatable themes in a sensory overload of aural viscera.

As Wohlers explains, “I recorded most of it during a pretty intense year for me -- the title [‘Bodymelt in the Garden of Death’] is a phrase that came into my head while I was hugging my mom in Atlanta the summer after an extreme medical crisis I wasn't sure she’d make it through. She's a gardener and we were surrounded by her flowers. It was sunset and had just rained and all the colors were lush and hot and glistening.”

Opener “Grasshopper Heaven'' perfectly presents Wohlers’ tonal palette, permeated with a cacophony of cicadas, floating dust, and softly serrated textures. Seemingly a soundtrack of the uncanny, the song presents a despaired walk through the moonlit woods that rivals Wolfgang Voigt’s perfect permafrost sheen as Gas. The rustic psychedelia continues on “An Angel’s Emerald Wing”, a shimmering squall of celestial noise that features frequent Wohlers collaborator Ruby Mars on harp. A-side closer “Life-Near-Others” offers a kaleidoscope of light and color buried under a fertile layer of topsoil and delicate delay.

“Preagricultural Summer” is a symphony of stabbing electronics, flourished feedback, and clanging metal, while “Attachment Illusion” seemingly inverts the action into a howling chimera of solitude. Feeling like a tidal wave of sorts, “How Heavy the Slow World” swells into its epic frame through a cycle of maxed-out tones and dis-harmony, its swirling storm of sound plowing through everything in its path and changing the landscape in its wake. Album closer “Meadow of Tears” culls a siren-like setting that’s both unsettling and comforting, a nod to the dire dilemma we all inevitably face.

In the end, ‘Bodymelt in the Garden of Death’ is an unassuming triumph of sonic bereavement, transmitting and translating deeply emotional uncertainty into wholly consuming sounds.

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