Emusic added Telefon Tel Aviv’s new album, Immolate Yourself, which was released on the same week as the loss of Charlie Cooper, half of the duo. Cooper’s death has saddened electronic music lovers worldwide, and made the album title seem much bleaker. But I want to excerpt a couple of Charlie Cooper’s quotes to Emusic’s Michaelangelo Matos, talking about ways in which the album itself was intended as a new beginning. Now that that album itself can go out into the world after Cooper’s death, music, as ephemeral as it is, can mean new beginnings.
We actively wanted a different sound and texture from the record. We needed a new way to do things. The first thing was, “We’re gonna get rid of the Rhodes, we’re gonna use synths.”
We’ve always joked about metal bands in the ’90s, like Incantation and Immolation, with these long, ridiculous, monosyllabic names: “We’ve got to do a song one day called “Immolate Your Anus” or “Inverted Meat Hook Sodomy.” Charlie wrote the song and had a different title for it, but it had lyrics about lighting himself on fire. I said, “Dude, let’s call it “Immolate Yourself,’ brah!” [laughs] It kind of took on a whole new light for the record. We just took our back catalog and torched it to the ground. It’s not a phoenix — we’ve destroyed everything we’ve been working on and are starting over.
Who Are … Telefon Tel Aviv [Emusic Magazine]