The Statue of Liberty is so hyperreal, so over-replicated in insurance ads and postage stamps and on the Vegas strip, that if you ever happen to be looking at her in real life, you won't see her at all. There she is on the cover of 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living, the new album by Asher White, in pieces but not destroyed -- in progress, being built, not yet complete. Scaffolding cages her body. Her torch is on the ground, her head somewhere out of frame. She's still in France. It's an old photo in faded sepia, but you can imagine her skin still gleaming: bare copper, no patina. Before she was a symbol, she was metal, and living, sweating people riveted her together.
Like White's previous album Home Constellation Study, 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living darts and weaves among boldly varied musical styles. Doom metal splits open into bossa nova; psychedelic rock and power pop flip into industrial techno. The record's quick turns and vivid contrasts reflect White's cultural voraciousness. A writer, painter, and sculptor as well as a musician, she gathers materials constantly, always digging for new ideas in every possible form. "It’s forever collage, forever assemblage," she says of her music. "To me, it has more to do with J Dilla, L.A. beat, and musique concrète than pop songwriting."
The books, movies, and albums that White was taking in while recording 8 Tips percolate throughout the album. The films of Claire Denis, the novels of Clarice Lispector, and the memoirs of Eve Babitz all funnel into White's reflection of 21st century disaster capitalism. People have survived catastrophe before: the work they made of the ruins around them can offer tools to parse our own contemporary collapse.
Each song emerges from its composite parts in the studio: White doesn't draft or demo before recording, but builds out her pieces sculpturally, sound by sound. With 8 Tips, she stretched her ideas further toward their natural extremes, rather than sanding them down at the end as she'd done in the past. "This is the first record where I was interested in more exploded and textural songcraft," she notes. "It’s truly experimental in that it’s actually borne of experiments. Usually, I do the experiments and then I throw most of it away. This is the first time I’ve felt audacious enough to leave it all in."
8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living wrenches open the idea of apocalypse -- an abrupt, totalizing disaster rained down on uncomplicated innocents -- and peers inside at its bursting, devastated particulars. Apocalypse is slow. It's uneven. Some people survive it. Some don't. Nations falter and so do individual people, clinging fast to their old, dilapidated self-preservation strategies. What saved you in the past might destroy you in the future. Flip it around, shake yourself loose, ruin the person you've known yourself to be, and you might get the chance to become something else.
