Object Collection 'It's All True'

About

It’s All True is an opera-in-suspension from New York ensemble Object Collection based on the complete live archives of iconic underground band Fugazi.

Grounded upon the Live Archive series of the Washington DC outfit, composer Travis Just and writer/director Kara Feely‘s work uses only the incidental music, text and sounds, none of Fugazi’s actual songs. An obsessive leap into 1500 hours of gig detritus spanning shows from 1987 to 2002, and encompassing random feedback, aimless drum noodling, pre-show activist speeches, audience hecklers, and the police breaking up gigs. All of this material is the foundation of an ear-body-and-mind-flossing 100 minutes for 4 voices/performers, 4 electric guitars/basses and 2 percussionists.

Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto comments: “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. While this project was in no way an active collaboration, 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.” The Huffington Post has called the opera “compelling, disturbing and shockingly beautiful”.

It‘s All True is overloaded, maddening, mundane, properly funny, and a radical incitement to action. Half of this delectably bruising megalith is collected here for the first time and on the accompanying Prisons For Profit EP SLP041, which together form Object Collection’s debut outings on Slip. The label itself came to a lot of people’s attention last year with the release of Mica Levi and Oliver Coates stunning Remain Calm collaboration, a track from which was recently picked by the New York Times in it’s article 25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going.

It’s All True was commissioned by and premiered at 2016’s Borealis Festival in Bergen, Norway. The album is available on 12” vinyl and CD with artwork featuring Henrik Beck’s beautiful photography of the original stage production. Vinyl comes with a foldout doublesided A2 newspaper print featuring both performance text and liner notes, replicated in the CD edition as a 20 page booklet. Mastered and cut by by Josh Bonati.

Object Collection was founded in 2004 by writer/director Kara Feely and composer/musician Travis Just. Based in Brooklyn, the group operates within the intersecting practices of performance, experimental music and theater. They are concerned with simultaneity, complexity, and radicality, combining dense layers of text, notation, objects and processes. They work to give audiences unconventional viewing experiences through our merging of theatricality and pedestrian activity. Their works upset habitual notions of time, pace, progression and virtuosity. They value accumulation above cohesion.