London experimental spoken word and electronics duo BAG land on Phantom Limb with mesmerising new album This House is a Body, marrying visceral poetry with exploratory production to achieve beguiling, occasionally screwy and occasionally dreamy sonics.


“This album functions as a floor plan, a house in itself, collecting and containing the ecosystems of multiple rooms,” write BAG - Canadian artist and poet Jody DeSchutter and London producer Daniel Allison. “The roles we play can be defined by the room we are in; and it can be near impossible to tell what room we are in without looking from outside. This album maps out a number of rooms which hold such relations, memories, or experiences and builds them all into a single house, a single body.”

Formed from Allison’s headspinning, depth-mining production for synthesis, field recording, and acoustic instrumentation, and DeSchutter’s lysergic and prophetic spoken word, the palette of This House is a Body can turn on a dime from claustrophobia and dread to hyperreal dream sequence, illuminated in sunstreamed glory in places and dripping with basement effluvia in others. Throughout, words, meaning, and imagery all dissolve into an architecture of alternately familiar and unknowable sound.

Key track “Floor Phlegm Hue” is built from wonky and stabbing bass synthesis, over which DeSchutter’s spellbound storytelling quivers between songform and witchcraft. Fried and freaked out saxophone from Gallon Drunk and PJ Harvey collaborator Terry Edwards heightens the anxiety and raises the goosebumps, allowed to stack the bassline or wriggle around it as the track develops. The track, and record, heavily features famed Brazilian percussionist Iggor Cavalera, and was recorded and produced by his wife and frequent collaborator Laima Leyton. “Laima’s voice as a producer and nurturer and her technical expertise really shines through,” writes DeSchutter. “She was integral to the recording, arranging, and production. The album feels like a shared baby with her.”

“Vessel Diaspora”, conversely, builds on angelic, reverberate piano chords - performed by auxiliary member Angèle David-Guillou - that pull us into DeSchutter’s dreamweaving. Every syllable is closely and intimately recorded to mimic an anatomical voice from within, while sensitively applied vocal treatments simulate the rooms of the body and the shaping effects they would cause to the voice. The rattle of the ribcage, the soupy squash of the innards, the rasping of the trachea.

Later, “Moth Ball” is full of disorientating sound design emanating from an imaginary and delirious room next door, its poetry spliced and stuttered, never in one place for long. The track reveals BAG’s love of outwardly avant performance art and the ecstatic spoken word found in NYC’s fertile early experimental scene. As DeSchutter reaches the rolls and roars of the piece’s coda, the apparition of earlier morphemes skitters in crescendo alongside woozy string synthesis.

BAG formed in London 2020 beginning as an art project consisting of members Jody DeSchutter (Canada) and Dan Allison (UK) and has developed into a live and recorded sonic entity including Angèle David-Guillou. DeShutter and Allison both studied as painters and approach sound through that lens: composition, layers, application and content. 2020 release Mapping Azure was selected by The Quietus as one of the year’s top ten albums released on cassette. In 2023 BAG collaborated with producer and label Charlie Behrens (Collapsing Drums) for the release of new album Momentary Lapses. This House is a Body is their third release.