Burzum Funtime by Dead Sharp

"We mistake the sounds of suffering for a party with cake and music. Kissing the sealed scroll we are surrounded only with fellow acolytes. In the darkness we accept and agree to the terms of our own demise."

The title of this album was conceived the same way I think of track names, titles for my drawings and paintings, and even the text elements that can appear in those visual works. Honestly, this shit just comes to me. In this case, “Burzym Funtime” first appeared in one of the many word lists I was posting to Instagram throughout 2024 (posted 6/9/24 to be exact; the track title Dialup Banger came from the same list). These lists were nonsensical, stream of conscious, and impulsive pairings of word sounds and concepts that made me laugh. This one in particular grabbed my attention because it referenced the 90’s Norwegian black metal band notorious for lead singer/songwriter Varg Vikernes’ murder of a member of another metal band and the burning of several churches. While I never had more than passing interest in Burzum the band, I though it sounded funny to drop that whole idea next to “funtime.” Murder, satanism, fascist leanings, church burnings… FUNTIME?!

Sounds like the current world we live in. The caverns and plateaus where light and dark maintain their boundaries have seemingly been flattened by endless doomscrolling, insatiable consumerism, and complacency. The economic, political, and mental health ramifications are lost in a morass of information and hot takes. “As long as I’m getting my fix, the light and dark can switch places for all I care,” said all of humanity, evidently.

This album isn’t a cultural critique, per se, but the state of the world as it is filtered through our life online or through our beliefs is always hovering in the background when I’m making new work. The juxtapositions described above are loosely evident in the visual and sonic language I’ve developed over the course of the last several years. In my visual work I’m always messing with the mundane and silly as well as the heavy and personal. Musically I’m interested in odd rhythmic and sonic textures. I like a combination of dread and playfulness - like the Dadaists making nonsensical poetry within earshot of the front lines during WWI. I like it when things sound like they’ve been distorted by time or accidentally discovered. I like using only a few elements, and definitely no more than three tracks. I’m constantly improvising with my own pre-existing condition. I think this record ticks all those boxes. I hope you dig it.

Part research and part platform, Dead Sharp is an audio project of artist Courtney Stubbert. This work extends his visual art practice into the realm of sonic textures, rhythm, sampling, and electro-acoustic noise. In it he investigates power, memory, structures and constructions of belief and the limits of language.

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