*200 copies limited edition* Iris Our is the new surrealist duo of artists Kiera Mulhern and Sydney Spann. Recital is honored to present their debut album, Victual Vittle Bottle Cunt. Both Mulhern and Spann have released celebrated solo works on Recital: Mulhern’s De ossibus 20 (2020) and Spann’s Sending Up A Spiral Of (2023). Close friends, they would meet up weekly on Saturdays to record; channeling their love, angst, and wit. The synergism of their friendship is evident: poems read in tandem, flanking each other's syllables and breaths. Voice, synthesis, various electronics, and kinetic field recordings (often from their shared lives) form the material.
The album’s conceptual core is femininity understood through diffusion, imitation, and horror, alongside themes of debt, addiction, and inheritance. Vestiges of these can be heard in verbal intercourses through an industrial hiss emerging from the CD. As the artists write: “the obscene impossibility of having a mouth that sucks, eats and speaks, and of a voice that commands, soothes, and curses.”
Many of the texts began as hand-drawn concrete poems by the duo. “Urnshaped Murmuration” stages Spann and Mulhern reciting texts in the left and right channels, chasing each other in a lapping ocean of shadow sounds. The final track “Erections of Angels Directed at Me” is immense. A hushed This Mortal Coil-esque melody is sung, as flush oscillators churn autonomously. Smoldering flutes glow ahead of distant metallic havoc. Despite its condensed 26-minute runtime, the album feels dense, commanding, and total.
The result is an authentic, sharp mythology—visceral research into “the body as disposable, the body as the object of medicine, the body as etched with words, the body in revolt.” Victual Vittle Bottle Cunt was engineered by Katie Von Schleicher, mixed by Theodore Cale Schafer, and mastered by Sean McCann. The pastel album cover by Maggie Fitzpatrick showcases a barren alley with a parked Tesla engulfed in flames. The release includes a booklet of concrete poems, artwork by the duo, and artist portraits by Gram Hummell.
