Multidisciplinary artist Malthus checksout youth injury, violence and frailty with his launching EP, COUNTRYCIDE, which functions contributions from Blackhaine, Sid Quirk, Magnus Westwell and Rainy Miller.
Following a string of enigmatic songs, ‘Heroin’, ‘Run Red’ and ‘I Hope For No Cold Shoulder’, each a heady mixture of rusted commercial textures, sporadic neoclassical plans and cold electronic structure, multidisciplinary artist and artist Malthus takes stock of his unflinchingly intimate noise and practice with COUNTRYCIDE. Shot through with the artist’s singularly raw shipment, at once stretched and grand, as though pressed out with violent force from deep behind his ribcage, the collection of tunes are a reflection on his youth growing up in Skelmersdale, Lancashire, and his developmental experiences of injury, violence and compound abuse. “I composed this entire thing about youth and I guess it was my effort to let go of a lot of the things that hadactually been following me around for my adult life,” he discusses. “I was quite ill for over a year after I captured Covid so this was actually my enthusiasm job to get me through a lot of the days I couldn’t leave the home – it’s been my tether and my rock and I’ve remade it numerous times attempting to get it .” Won’t Go Easy was born out of his battle with illness, days of tightness and aggravation wracking each swell of radioactive strings and deep bass throb. At once cathartic lament and blissful rallying cry, Won’t Go Easy plumbs the depths of incapacitating disease while magnifying the magnitude of the willpower and strength needed to standfirm, shedding brand-new light on how the artist’s past has shaped his present. “Won’t Go Easy was composed about the problem of injury being so impacted by your past that you kind of lose work,” he describes. “I’ve invested so much time alone simply kind of soaking in my life that I required to remind myself that it does get muchbetter at some point – producing this work from that sensation offers me that recognition of enhancement.”
“Writing and producing my veryfirst EP came togetherwith getting more into motion and filmmaking too, and making this movie with Martha Treves was such a stunning procedure,” Malthus continues. “We truly gelled artistically and it was enough to get the entire task over the line when I had kind of run out of steam after my year in hell.” Captured in the twisted forests and along the windswept coast of Dorset, Treves’ visual takes us from the candle-lit boundaries and stained glass of a small chapel to an extensive outdoors, positioning the viscerality of Malthus’ bent corporeal frame in counterpoint with a god’s-eye view of natural charm, skin and bone in chorus with soil and limestone. “In lotsof methods the movie is led by travelling and motion,” discusses Treves. “Malthus had informed me about his year of healthproblem and the aggravations that come with being physically weak, so it appeared fitting to develop something that explored with limitation and disruptive motion. I had constantly appreciated and been fascinated by Malthus’ jagged and irregular motion design, and having the chance to teamup with him on a movie that utilizes this motion to checkout his individual experiences was actually interesting. We shot the movie over 2 days in Dorset and in the middle of Storm Dennis. The impressive weathercondition, changing inbetween 60 milesperhour winds, hail downpours and abrupt bursts of sunshine, appeared to echo the stateofmind of the track itself: it was unforeseeable, strong and otherworldly.” Draped with scruffy wool and uneven fabric, Malthus’ jerking motions communicate months of pent up stress, as though bound by his own body, held taught versus the world. As Won’t Go Easy reaches its’ climax with delighted horns and soari