Alec Empire vs. Elvis Presley – El Turco Loco Records [Album As Art #100]

I remember a lot of things from Lollapallooza ’97:

• Lost Boyz tore it up for a bunch of white folks with goatees (save me, who couldn’t grow one at the time);
• I believe Snoop Dogg was serviceable;
• Prodigy and Korn kancelled;
• Tool changed my life;
• Freaks were everywhere …

For some reason, Atari Teenage Riot, the brainchild of Alec Empire, barely register in my memory banks. I vaguely recall some intense beats, maybe some samples, but that’s IT; hell, I could have confused them for those wankers in Prodigy had I not known of their cancellation prior …

It was my loss. Empire’s resume is impressive, his various feats rendering him perhaps the Julian Cope of the electronic, often copyright-challenging generation of musicians that emerged in the ’80s (others: Negativeland, Nitzer Ebb, Front 242, The Residents, etc.).

This post is focused on just one of Empire’s achievements: His ass-out, sound-melting, muck-job of a “collaboration” (hence the “vs.”) with Elvis Presley that fuses the King’s vocals with all manner of nuclear-ready electronics.

This isn’t your typical mash-up of a Britney Spears song with the theme from Snorks, but a dinner mash-up where everything in sight gets fucked … HARD. Presley often gets forgotten, yet his absence yields way for even more fascinating explorations, so it’s impossible to take umbrage with the inconsistency.

Empire essentially uses Presley’s grunts, asides, movie moments and melodies as skeletal foundations for giant blobs of bass-blasting, noise-hurtling IDM/electronica (you might have even called it “techno” back then) that goes way past any notions of dancefloor synchronicity, glitching, hitching, stopping, starting, juking and jiving as it hops from one E-vis moment to the next.

AE vs. EP is so ahead of its time it’s disgustipating. Empire foresees new genres, studio tricks and tools of manipulation, and if you spend your days/nights warping sound in some way, watching its colors dripping down the walls, you’ve been influence by Empire — and maybe this ALBUM — in some way.

Panicsville, Aphex Twin‘s Druckqs album, Excepter — oh FUCK this might be the most direct connection — flash.bat, Secret Mommy, John Wiese solo; all have sucked from Empire’s teat in some way, whether consciously or unconsciously, furthering a practice that turns the ears into scientific objects, employed to analyze fresh data, rather than tools used to entertain oneself.

If you’ve been following Gumshoe’s explorations via Skyscraper or Tiny Mix Tapes for any amount of time, you know long-lost albums like Alec Empire vs. Elvis Presley are the reason I opened the Shoe HQ in the first place; seek this out and be one of the first in on the Empire/Atari Teenage Riot revival.