No Age announces new album, ‘An Object’
Anyone dispirited by music’s move to the digital and ephemeral will be pleased by the ideas behind the L.A. art-punk band No Age’s new record.
“An Object,” the band’s fourth full-length and third for Sub Pop, comes three years after 2010’s acclaimed “Everything in Between,” and will be released in America on Aug. 20. As with Daft Punk’s Paul Williams collaboration, it relishes physical contact.
The band said it experimented with a wide range of physical processes in recording, including contact mikes, treated speakers, and even a hands-on approach to the album artwork and packaging with longtime visual collaborator Brian Roettinger. An early promotional copy of the album came in an oversized box with the charmingly industrialized note, “Manufactured by No Age.”
High art, noise-rock and fetishizing manufacturing processes have been around as long as Warhol and Peter Savile, but in the Internet era, No Age is fighting for the tangible. Even the single “I Won’t Be Your Generator” has a whiff of revolt from the world’s “content creators” to it.
No Age is the rare band that can score a Rodarte film while also playing an anti-Wal-Mart protest in Chinatown and trolling a Converse promotional event by playing films of sweatshop workers onstage. No Age is clearly interested in how processes inform the way real things get made -- color us interested to hear its latest work of art in the age of digital reproduction.
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