Jesse Draxler is best known as a visual artist specializing in striking monochrome collages and manipulated photography. He’s created artwork for a host of musicians including Nine Inch Nails, Poppy, Deafheaven, Chelsea Wolfe and former Dillinger Escape Plan singer Greg Puciato’s electronic band the Black Queen, but he’s also a noise-maker in his own right.
His forthcoming second album, Tongue of Angels, is an 18-track collaborative and experimental effort featuring contributions from 21 likeminded creators including Iggor Cavalera (Sepultura), Ian Astbury (The Cult), Zola Jesus, Trace Amount, Black Magnet and VENERA, the dark ambient duo comprising Korn guitarist James “Munky” Shaffer and electronic musician and drummer Chris Hunt. Building on the ideas introduced with his 2020 debut album and art book, Reigning Cement, Draxler approached Tongue of Angels as a systems designer rather than a traditional songwriter. The project is built from a shared dataset of edited field recordings distributed to each contributor as a common source material from which entirely original works could emerge.
Today (August 17th), Revolver is stoked to premiere Draxler’s joint effort with VENERA, “ASBESTOS,” along with its car-smashing, demolition-derby-set music video. Working with the Tongue of Angels source material, Shaffer and Hunt created a grinding, beat-heavy hellscape readymade for both industrial-club dance floors and listeners’ nightmares. Watch and listen above.
“There are only a handful of artists that have the energy and passion for music and art that [Jesse Draxler] does,” Shaffer tells Revolver of the collab. “You can feel how much he loves and enjoys the process of creating whatever he works on. He’s extremely talented. His openness to collaborations allows for others to explore and expand their own creativity.”
Hunt adds: “I agree. Jesse is a generous artist with a keen sensibility towards texture, decay and materiality which resonates with what we’re interested in with our own work. It was an intriguing task looking at the inside of his brain, hearing bits of the world through his ears and attempting to contextualize those sounds. Sometimes field recording is flattened into a pursuit of purity and accuracy of an environment so it’s worthwhile to get to interact with sound like any other compelling textural piece of trash on the street or rotting wall or weird anomaly to be investigated and constructed with.”
Tongue of Angels is due out digitally August 24th via Federal Prisoner, the label Draxler co-founded with Puciato, with a 2LP vinyl release planned for September. In addition to the album and label, Draxler has also launched an app called RIP.ID which serves as a portal to the album’s universe and opens it up to interaction.