Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Licht: die sieben Tage der Woche, David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy. The history of music is littered with these sorts of compositional projects, song cycles, and album series — ambitious multi-course aural feasts and sonic feats connected by grand motifs and big ideas. We’re talking huge monstrosities that take on the monosyllabic, monolithic themes of Life and Death, Love and Loss.
But what happens when you ignore the meat and potatoes and apply the same multi-part structure to the stuff that goes on top? That’s the question Detroit’s Lord Scrummage have long been exploring in an ongoing, twelve-part conceptual series about (what else?) condiments. In the past, the band have devoted roughly a year each to salsa, chili, mayo, and honey, creating a video, song, and related works for each edible accompaniment.
Today, Detroit Music Magazine is honored to premiere the latest entry in Lord Scrummage’s condiment series. “The Sprinkle” celebrates the mini, many-hued confection found atop ice cream or frozen yogurt, although in the song’s video — directed by the group’s own Conor Edwards — this rainbow-colored treat quickly takes on a nightmarish hue.
Fans of Lord Scrummage will recognize many of the aesthetic hallmarks from previous works: a fixation on the abject, the dreamworld logic of the threadbare plot, banal objects used in bizarre ways, equating food with drugs or sex, and a superflat, compressed depth of field — despite constantly shifting layers of hand-drawn animation, lo-fi special effects, retro-tech sprites and computer renderings, and live actors. You may feel as if you’re watching a Mike Kelley or Paul McCarthy performance piece as filmed by Ryan Trecartin.
The many visual elements vie for your attention, but it’s not hard to be captivated by the main character’s mutating roles. As Edwards tells us, his personae in “The Sprinkle” are not too removed from reality: “[The video is] sort of a comment on how the Internet allows people to connect over and expand on extremely narrow and specific interests and fetishes. It was also heavily inspired by the actor who plays the main character, who is a professional Santa, clown, magician, and fetish model in his real life. The video is meant to be a webcam show that spans an entire lifetime, hopping back and forth through time.”
The temporal flux and narrative ambiguity of the visuals find a foil in the song itself, which opens on a firm beat and insistent bass groove that open up to a wash of synths. They sound almost sun-kissed, which may explain the opening line: “I like the weather today.” Ibiza goes industrial, as the track gathers steam on its way to the chorus, with lead singer Alex Lauer conflating “rolling” and “getting high” with romantic love or companionship. And of course it all goes back to condiments: “You are a sprinkle in my eye.”
Lord Scrummage and its related entities have been a fixture in the Detroit underground scene for so long now that it’s hard to imagine the city’s musical landscape today without them leading the way. Like-minded collectives such as #CoOwnaz can count Scrummage as a forebear, the proliferation of DIY events such as BFF Fest follows in the footsteps of Scrummage Fest, and before Adult Contemporary was ever a going concern there was Scrummage University.
Although the individual members of Lord Scrummage are mainly focused on their own projects these days (Lauer performs regularly as Clyde Moop and as a member of Money Pitts and Associated, Edwards does production work for artists such as VNESS Wolfchild and Chronic Tan, and David Rosman releases material under the moniker Horatio Clam), it’s good to hear new work from the group after a long absence. This late-summer release may be a surreal sprinkle in our eyes, but it’s music to our ears.
Watch the Detroit Music Magazine premiere of “The Sprinkle” below: