Own Your Ghost - Friends of Friends

Friends of Friends Network
5111 ½ Stratford Rd., Los Angeles, CA 90042
www.fofmusic.net [email protected]
13 & God – Own Your Ghost
Label: Anticon.
Release Dat e: 5/17
Track Listing:
1. Its Own Sun
2. Death Major
3. Armored Scarves
4. Janu Are
5. Old Age
6. Et Tu
7. Death Minor
8. Sure As Debt
9. Beat On Us
10. Unyoung
Press Contact:
Friends of Friends Music
Six years after releasing their beautifully brittle eponymous debut, the crosscontinental musical brotherhood of 13 & God returns with Own Your Ghost.
This second album marks a vital shift, from collaborative project to bona fide
band, as Oakland art-rap stalwarts Themselves (Adam “Doseone” Drucker and
Jeffrey “Jel” Logan, plus Subtle’s Dax Pierson and Jordan Dalrymple) and
German pop experimentalists the Notwist (Markus and Micha Acher, Martin
Gretschmann) truly become one. Own Your Ghost is a warm set of lifeaffirming songs on the subject of death, drawing its magic in equal parts from
raw spontaneity, lush melody and boundless imagination.
No song embodies this better than “Armored Scarves.” Here, a swirl of
acoustic strums, piano plinks, drum hits and electronic bits lifts Markus’ icy
coo and, in turn, Adam’s own rarely heard singing voice, building to a fullband chant that echoes the theme: Protect your neck against the scythe of time.
Also approaching 13 & God perfection is “Death Minor,” whose moody
splendor and orchestral swing can’t help but bring to mind a mix of Broadcast
and David Axelrod. It’s a gorgeously noirish backdrop for the musings of the
two frontmen, who, while recording, would pull their lyrics from a stack of
Adam’s poems, letting each song find its words organically.
Though 13 & God carve out a genre that is distinctly theirs, Own Your Ghost
is a hugely diverse album. At its center are two polar opposites, “Old Age” and
“Et Tu.” While the former is, at its core, an upbeat, fuzz-caked summer song,
the latter is a black and menacing slab of glitch-riddled krautrock. Two tracks
later, a stuttering Bhangra beat propels “Sure As Debt” as Adam growls out a
rap about old age and unpaid bills. Strings, keys, woodwinds and turntables
were all bent to the band’s cause. They banged on shelves and boxes of
change, played a broken kora and a hacked Game Boy, and sampled Sylvia
Plath, Marilyn Hacker, and themselves via dubplate.
The record was made over three sessions, the first in Oakland—with a feed
running from the mixing board to Dax’s bedroom—and the other two in
Weilheim at the Notwist’s studio. Sometimes Markus takes lead (to wit,
handsome opener “Its Own Sun” and the grittier, almost jammy “Beat On Us”)
and sometimes Adam does (see atmospheric piece “Death Major” and the
massively swaggerful “Janu Are”). But despite being a seven-bodied beast, 13
& God remains single-headed, committed to building a body of work that will
outlast us all. By example, they remind us to get our life-after-death on,
creatively speaking. In other words, Own Your Ghost.
Leeor Brown // [email protected] // 323-346-7884 // lazybrow (AIM)