Featured Video: Object as Subject – ‘Temporary Bodies’

“I want you free from enough,” screams OBJECT AS SUBJECT singer/songwriter Paris Hurley on her forthcoming sophomore album, HERETIC. Free from shame. Free from the bondage of self. Free from the need to validate one’s existence through doing or having. Tracing the archetype of The Heretic – the one who chooses – the record traverses varied terrain from monsoon-induced floods to celebratory dance parties, creating a balm for the bruises left by scarcity and capitalism. At once a ritual, a portal, a spell, an invocation; this is music to move your body and feel your feelings to. Returning to oneself, death, grief, trust, and receiving are all featured themes, made real by Hurley’s haunting, shapeshifting vocal delivery across these 10 tracks. A close collaboration with producer, Ben Kaplan (Sleep Maps / Lost Future Records), HERETIC transforms the raw ritual punk of her first record, PERMISSION (2018), into a sacred and cinematic world filled with pulsing drums, synths, gritty bass, and lush string arrangements. Both a ritual for its listeners and deeply personal, HERETIC is an autobiographical journey through Hurley’s interior, spanning her childhood in the Sonoran desert, her experience as a woman, a reclaiming of her own God concept, and her path to becoming a mother.

TEMPORARY BODIES

Wildness wilderness / Come for me
Smoke fills my mouth my eyes / Suffocating I hide / I hide in plain sight
I cough and sputter / A relic of my grandmothers / Sweat through my sheets again
Fall to my knees again / Hide in this body / These feet they carry me
Surrender

These feet carry me into the woods / Through my fear over mountains
Sending me messages in smoke / From my future self
Can’t fight what I don’t know / I writhe against this sorrow / A knife under my pillow
Cough out my needs again / Sputter through teeth again / Fall to my knees again
Somehow I bleed again
Surrender

Smoke fills my mouth my lungs my eyes / An offering left behind
God do I stay God will I die / God will I survive the night
Temporary bodies of water / Free me fill me carry me
I am the temple the vessel / What will devour my fear

Brendan Gill – Director, Editor, Cinematography • Paris Hurley – Performance, Choreography • Emilia Richeson-Valiente – Performance, Choreography • Erica Rice – Costume designer • Jessica Owen – Costume fabricator

OBJECT AS SUBJECT is American musician, composer, and choreographer, Paris Hurley. A shapeshifting autobiographical exploration supported by a long lineage of collaborators, the project places Hurley as the subject of her own story, questioning the edges of objecthood and obligation as a woman at its core. OAS originated in Seattle (2014) as a solo project turned trio and evolved into a music and dance collective that bridged gritty ceremonial punk with performance art in Los Angeles, thrashing its way through audiences and bringing forth debut album, PERMISSION, in 2018. Now Philadelphia-based, she has taken a lush and cinematic turn for sophomore album, HERETIC, with producer, Ben Kaplan (Sleep Maps) and contributors, Jherek Bischoff and Emily Hope Price, exploring themes of choice, interdependence, and sovereignty across 10 tracks.

Heretic is available on LP, CD and digital on May 12, 2023 via Lost Future Records and can be purchased and downloaded HERE.