I was into old emo music like My Chemical Romance, which is still an amazing band, by the way.
He got me into these emo CDs like Silverstein and Hawthorn Heights, but I was also super into ACDC. That’s where I knew of people that were making music, and that’s where I met my best friend, Andrew, who got me into the aspect of sitting down and listening to music. Was it in Elkton, Maryland where you originally got into guitar? We went to South Philly to an old manga/anime shop, and that’s where we got a bunch of Dragon Ball Z and Trigun dub tapes. They had curse words on them and I was trippin’. My brother got me dubbed Dragon Ball Z tapes when I was 10. I still love anime, it’s my favorite medium, but when I was younger I listened to the Pokemon soundtrack and the Dragon Ball Z stuff. When I was young, pretty much the only music I was listening to was the music my parents had on, or it was the Pokemon soundtrack. From there, I moved to Elkton, Maryland, which is where I grew up and went to high school – the formative years where you figure out what you want to be. I moved around quite a bit, and when I was 12 my mom left my father and moved to an apartment in Delaware. Yeah, I grew up in Pennsylvania in a really small area called Avon Grove. You grew up in a small town, right? How did that impact your later musical mindset? We also discussed the evolution of his recording process from using digital recording decks to music software, but without completely ditching his tried and true songwriting techniques. Although Taylor’s music reveals a fascination with multi-faceted sound, he is clearly not interested in polishing recordings to perfection.Ī few weeks back, we spoke to Taylor about his musical education, and how he first got into making music. And, on Truck Music, the listener can sense that Body Meat is no mere exercise in the musical now, but a project that can accomodate the many sounds of his youth. “What I was trying to do sonically on Truck Music was to use sounds of my biology and ancestry and where I come from with the music, creating a palette that I could learn from,” says Taylor, who emphasizes that he never has a plan or concept before writing and recording. Taylor also grew up listening to a lot of music by the genre-hopping 70s band Earth Wind & Fire, while car rides with his father would invariably feature a combination of late 1990s pop music mixed with artists like Luther Vandross and Sade. At the time, he was 7 or 8 years old, so he can no longer recall the songs she sang, but the moment stuck with him. Some of Taylor’s earliest memories are of his mother singing in a falsetto on the back porch of their “yellow house”. Quite the contrary – Body Meat’s sound is firmly grounded in live performance, augmented by sampling drum pads, a MIDI keyboard, and guitar for various sounds, as well as his own vocals, sometimes chopped and glitched, other times shining through in the upper register.
Taylor’s sonic experiments are by no means the product of endless editing and stitching. His creations are prismatic and in flux, but the experimental sound design of Body Meat always has pop music as its inspiration and endpoint. While Taylor delights in ripping tracks apart at their seams, there is an undeniable beauty in that brokenness. Truck Music is a sliced and chopped genre patchwork, executed using unexpected technique and singular logic that results in songs that sound like multiple tracks at once. When Philadelphia-based electronic musician Body Meat (Christopher Taylor) dropped his seventh album Truck Music last year, listeners could hear the deft and acrobatic fusion of genres like trap, glitch, Chicago footwork and R&B.