An Illustrated Review of Body/Dilloway/Head

Carl Antonowicz is a Texas-reared, Tulsa-based illustrator, performer, writer, director, cartoonist, and calligrapher. Support his work on Patreon!


When the mask comes off, the sparks fly. Kim Gordon and Bill Nace’s Body/Head project has been top of the junk heap for a while now, always spewing sonic magma like an ancient fire creature ready to pull the Earth apart. Their music is infused with an ageless power built from ashes that glow white hot. Adding tape gargler Aaron Dilloway to the mix puts the whole thing through a subeterranean mixing bowl and the resulting glop is a masterpiece of decay.

Angled guitar howls spike out in all directions from a viscous magnetic globule. Nace is one of my favorite guitarists on the planet and when Dilloway melts these shards into a living, breathing Frankenstein monster, it’s like getting another lease on life. Gordon hovers above it all, shooting ghost lightning from hazy clouds encircling her disembodies whispers. There’s a moment in “Secret Cuts” where her spectral words mesh with the repeating guitar splatter in a way that feels like finding transcendance with the silenced voices in our heads. 

Disorienting drones appear briefly before being clawed back into the darkness. I’m lost, but pretty okay with it in the end. Gordon and Nace have a deep chemistry. Each of them move in alignment with the other, fuzzed-out eerie loops gliding beneath emotive guitar arrangements that evoke a somberness that swims through a frozen river of unease. Dilloway is always lurking, though, twisting passages into the phantom sprites of another world while I'm a fading ghost hiding in the aural shadows.


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