Body Meat Can’t Stop Moving

Based on a cursory spin, Chris Taylor’s output under the moniker Body Meat might seem maximalist and left-field. But digging in, an unexpected sugariness reveals itself. The New York State-based genre-bender twists footwork, club and R&B into shifty tracks peppered with riveting turns. “I would have started a very different project if I wanted to be popular,” Taylor says with a laugh.

Taylor aims to cultivate sonic illusions that allow people who wouldn’t typically enjoy experimentation to engage with Body Meat without thinking anything is out of the ordinary. “The way I see it is I’m always trying to make it sound normal,” he says. “I want someone to hear something I make, and it can be in a really, really strange time signature, or there’s a lot of stuff behind the scenes going on. But when you hear it, you think it’s in four—you think it’s, like, a normal thing.” His sly mission is succeeding: Taylor’s full-length debut, Starchris, is issued by indie institution Partisan Records, landing alongside comparably approachable releases from labelmates including Beth Orton and Cigarettes After Sex.

Taylor’s childhood thrummed with creativity. His parents were hobbyist funk musicians, who helped instill in him a love of rhythm by playing African music at home. Their influence rubbed off on Taylor in the long run, and he pays homage to ancestry through his music. He cites innovative Black dance labels Nyege Nyege Tapes and Principe as important touchstones for Body Meat.

Taylor moved around often as a kid, but he spent a good chunk of his teenage years on the Maryland-Delaware border. Upon leaving the nest, he attended art school in California for a year, before dropping out and moving to Denver where he tapped into the Colorado DIY circuit. He tried his hand at gigging in bands with friends, but quickly found that rock music wasn’t for him. “We were really trying to see how good we could get at guitar,” he reminisces with a smile. Although Taylor remembers having fun writing complicated riffs, he started Body Meat because he had an idea for something flexible and alien. His solo material became a place for malleability, something detached from convention.

Taylor put out the first Body Meat record, PS1, in 2016—a collection of guitar-driven instrumentals recorded with slipshod gear on borrowed laptops. After relocating to Philadelphia in 2018 and teaching himself how to produce with Ableton, his formula became futuristic and eclectic. Body Meat fell adjacent to a corner of the East Coast underground inhabited by celebrated peers such as Palm and SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE. Taylor recently decamped from Pennsylvania to Beacon, New York—a woodsy community 50 miles removed from metropolitan bustle. As many of his best friends were exiting Philadelphia, he stumbled into a creative rut and realized it was time for a change. Taylor is motivated by the newfound nature, which fuels a desire to make increasingly fiery music. “It’s funny, living in the city made me want to put more space in my music. And then living out here makes me want to make more intense music.” Being surrounded by so much openness, Taylor hopes to offset emptiness with a wall of sound.

Watching a video of Taylor playing live, it immediately becomes apparent that he has found ways to make MIDI performance fun. He employs a rig of sampling percussion pads and keyboards, taking breaks from triggering rushes and bloops to sing into an effect-laden microphone. “I’m not really good at learning the minutiae of an instrument, per say,” he says. “I’m really into learning the program of something, or how something works. But when it comes to learning every little bit about a synth or every little bit about a piece of gear, I mostly like to stay kind of in the dark about it because it takes a little bit of the joy away.” For Taylor, getting too into the nitty gritty of an instrument can strip the magic from the initial spark that accompanies hearing a noise for the first time. He instead opts to find interesting pieces of gear and use them in unintended ways.

It’s easy to fixate on Taylor’s impressive technicality. But Body Meat’s thrilling weirdness is equally tethered to his commanding, sporadic lyricism. Taylor begins writing by laying down scratch vocals, messing around with various wordless melodies until he’s settled into something that flows. He’ll fill in the blanks with phrases, messing around with rhyme schemes and trying to construct a narrative that makes sense. “Sometimes, I don’t even really know what some of the songs mean,” he says. His backtrack-heavy process results in music that restlessly zooms between scattered vignettes.

Taylor began sketching Starchris roughly three years ago. At first, he felt unsure whether or not he liked the body of songs. Then, on a European tour with hip-hop crew Injury Reserve, he figured out ways to saturate the drafts to make them grippingly destructive. “I figured out how to produce the record through that,” he says. “So then, when I came home, I had taken videos of some of the live shows and stuff that worked, and I started working that stuff in.” He eventually asked his friend Michael Blumenfeld to help mix the record, enabling Taylor to break his habit of obsessive mixing. He would hole up in his apartment for hours on end, then take the train into New York City to tweak the songs with the help of Blumenfeld. Songs sometimes neared their final forms in transit, inspiration striking Taylor as he shuttled between the Hudson Valley and Brooklyn.

After months of tweaking and bouncing back and forth, Taylor finally decided Starchris was complete. “I completely broke down and started crying. I couldn’t believe I had finished it, not even because I thought the music was, like, amazing. I think it was just because I’d worked so hard to make something that had all of these sounds that I’d never really tried to make happen, ” he reflects.

Starchris is titled as a nod to video games Taylor enjoys, in which the overarching universe impacts the storyline. He set out to make an album that evokes someone transforming into a ball of celestial energy and finding their true form. Starchris brims with equal parts enchantment and electricity. Over the course of eight minutes, “Ōbu No Serei (Spirit of an Orb)” morphs from serene avant-pop to clattering, deconstructed dance music; it came to life across many days, and is so intricate that Taylor’s laptop can barely load the file without crashing. “North Side” is deceptively cutesy, centered on burbling, whimsical synths that occasionally disintegrate into pummeling climaxes. At its most cathartic, “Im In Pieces” borders on glam, but just as quickly degenerates into industrial chugging. The whole record emphasizes Taylor’s ability to make music that is in constant motion.

Taylor views Starchris as the final stamp on Body Meat’s current chapter. He plans to branch out and explore different styles on records to come. While he hopes to inspire listeners to make their own art, he is already preoccupied with what’s next for his own realm. “Sometimes when I put something out, it loses the magic,” he says. “It gains some magic from people reacting to it, but you lose what you imagined it being.” In true Body Meat fashion, Taylor is pondering ways to keep people guessing as he pushes into bold new territory.

Ted Davis is a culture writer, editor and musician from Northern Virginia, currently based in Los Angeles. He is the Music Editor for Merry-Go-Round Magazine. On top of Paste, his work has appeared in Pitchfork, FLOOD Magazine, Aquarium Drunkard, The Alternative, Post-Trash, and a slew of other podcasts, local blogs and zines. You can find Ted on Twitter at @tddvsss.