Indestructible Object
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EP by They Might Be Giants | |||||
| First released | April 4, 2004 Release details / collectors: Show | Hide |
Tracks | 5 | |||
| Label | Barsuk Records <bark35> | Length | 12:32 | |||
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Indestructible Object is a five-song EP by They Might Be Giants, released on April 4, 2004. It preceded the band's tenth studio album, The Spine, which was released three months later.
Purchase[edit]
| Seller | Format | Price | Link |
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| AAC | $3.99 |
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Description[edit]
Background[edit]
The EP consists of material from a few different projects. "Am I Awake?" was created as the theme song for the 2003 TLC television series Resident Life. "Caroline, No", a cover of the 1966 Beach Boys song, was recorded live in June 2003 with the TMBG Mini-Brass ensemble for the radio show Studio 360. "Ant", a remake of a B-side from 1990, was recorded in December 2003 with TMBG's Other Thing brass ensemble. "Memo to Human Resources" and "Au Contraire" were recorded for The Spine and included here as a preview of the album.
This version of "Au Contraire" differs from the album version, featuring a flute solo instead of the guitar solo. Both "Au Contraire" and "Memo to Human Resources" appear to have been recorded earlier than the rest of The Spine, which may explain their inclusion on the EP. The tracks both feature Dan Hickey on drums rather than Marty Beller, and were the band's final studio recordings with Hickey. Danny Weinkauf does not appear on any of the EP's five tracks and is not credited in the liner notes.
Artwork[edit]
The EP is titled after Indestructible Object, a 1958 found object sculpture by surrealist artist Man Ray. The piece was a recreation of his 1923 sculpture Object to Be Destroyed, which had been destroyed by student protestors in 1957.
The cover of the EP, credited to R. Conant and H. Phmk (Sam Potts), features an illustration of a transit theodolite, an instrument primarily used in land surveying to measure horizontal and vertical angles. The illustration was taken from Standard Instruments of Precision, a catalog published by C.L. Berger & Sons in 1915. The typeface used on the cover is Cottonwood. The band distributed promotional matchbooks featuring the EP's cover for free at shows in 2004.
John Flansburgh wrote about designing the cover in a March 16, 2004, mailing list email:
At the beginning of putting together the EP, I was curious about doing something with a found photo since we've made a lot of illustrated covers recently. I always really enjoyed the way the Flood photo worked (which I found quite at random on a contact sheet print in the Time Life archive crawling around looking through cardboard file boxes in the basement of that giant building- but that's another story). I was doing the 21st century equivalent for this project- going through the Corbis archive online which is filled with tons of unusual cultural ephemera.
I soon ran across these various photos of the artist Man Ray at [Corbis]. You are probably aware of Man Ray's style as a photographer, if not his many interesting images- he made these very startling black and white photographs that were often solarized (exposing the film or print to small amounts of light and then freezing that process in development- I'm not sure of HIS process, but he was the guy who popularized this effect). He also was part of the early Dadaist movement, and created one of the movement's most memorable images in the sculpture known as "Indestructible Object." The thing is not quite a found object, but close. It is a wooden metronome with a photograph of an eyeball attached to where the slider on the metronome's arm would be. I always loved the direct simplicity of this highly loaded-up image, and its bridge between the Braque/Picasso cubist musical motifs and the kind of 50's melodramatic surreal Salvador Dali/Twilight Zone creepiness.
ANYWAY, they got all these Man Ray photos and I'm searching around and I found this photo. It seemed perfect to me- it shows an elderly and slightly fragile Man Ray, in a wheelchair no less, holding on to his historic "Indestructible Object". The multiple contrary motions of the photo with the sculpture and its place in art history were kind of blowing my mind. Beyond simply an old man in a wheelchair grasping anything with that boastful title being an odd contradiction, it was strange to see how perfectly untranscendent the actual sculpture looked in someone's hands- you usually only see it in a display case. It seemed much more dumpy and earthbound- just a metronome with a taped-on cut-out photo. Then it kind of all came home to me- the title Indestructible Object, which always was a bit of a mystery to me, (though I just filed it alongside all the other Dadaist enigma-driven titles) was really about how the actual idea of the piece worked- how the idea will just stick in your head forever whether you want it there or not. The way the photo illustrated his mortality made me realize the immortality of the work.
So I was really diggin' all of this- the photo, the title, the sculpture. I thought I was lucky too. The photo will be cheap since it's a photo in a stock house and it's a photo taken at a news event and copyright cleared by our excellent First Amendment. I confidently printed out the image and started pasting up my little mock-up of the EP cover. I was finally down to the afternoon I was doing the actual layout with the fine graphic designer Sam (the same fellah who did such a great job with Bed Bed Bed). I thought to gave Corbis a jingle to see how much it would actually cost. The dude at Corbis gave me the bad news straight out- the photo would cost a trillion dollars, and it's actually not "model" cleared (Man Ray as a model) so I would have to NEGOTIATE with the estate of Man Ray in France which would probably take forever and probably cost two trillion francs.
I was seriously bummed, but we made a mad scramble. Sam has an extensive library of amazing graphic books from the excellent 20th century. We found some beautiful objects in a catalog from 1915 called "Standard Instruments of Precision" (which is a pretty good title itself). The object we appropriated for the cover is called a theodolite. It's a surveyor's instrument which is "a transit with a telescope attached." This device allows you to, say, track the passage of a celestial body over the meridian of place, or, if you're up for it, the passage of a smaller body such as Venus across the disc of a larger body such as the sun. All your home transit needs in one excellent object! So we didn't get the killer photo, but we stuck to the original title. Doesn't make too much sense any more, but that's the way it goes.
Track listing[edit]
| # | Title | Length | Lyrics | Guitar Tab |
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| 1 | Am I Awake? | 3:04 | 
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| 2 | Memo To Human Resources | 2:03 |
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| 3 | Au Contraire | 2:26 |
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N/A |
| 4 | Ant | 2:55 |
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N/A |
| 5 | Caroline, No | 2:05 |
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N/A |
Gallery[edit]
CD
Back cover artwork (Australian Release)
Promotional poster
