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Music

Bored Lord Was Spawned By the Internet, and There He Shall Live

"My work is going to be decorating a Facebook news feed or a Tumblr dashboard. I work with that in mind."

We often pigeonhole musicians into two-dimensional characters rather than seeing them as fully realized human beings. Extracurriculars is a series that uncovers unknown, surprising, and often super weird non-musical interests of DJs and producers—and lets them explain how it all relates back to their work. 

During a routine romp through the Internet's many K-holes, I stumbled upon Bored Lord through an art gallery called Gallery Online that exists only on Facebook. It seemed apt, since Bored Lord's music and art seems to have sprouted out fully-formed from the Internet, just as Athena did from the head of Zeus.

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Bored Lord is part of Rare Nnudes, a digital collective that includes fellow cyber artists BastienGOAT, minivan_markus, and p l a i n t e x t. Their Bampcamp contains some truly ace releases by a variety of Internet musicians, and true to the vaporwave/seapunk form, it's strewn with as many Japanese characters as English ones. The collective's two slogans are "birthed from the Internet's mainframe" and "transcendent digital shamanism," which I think says a lot while meaning nothing at all.

What I'm trying to say is that Bored Lord's work doesn't just exist primarily on the Internet—it is the Internet. His visual reference points are couched in social media—the same medium that will lead you to his work in the first place. His images are like a hall-of-mirrors of infinitely repeating logos and symbols, plastered on humanoids with blank expressions (maybe they're just bored?). This stark blankness, closed-circuit repetition, and logo fetishism seems to echo the self-referentiality of the internet itself.

Bored Lord's visual and sonic palette puts him in the same virtual plaza as artists like Gatekeeper, Fatima Al-Qadiri, Nguzunguzu, and Physical Therapy. And, like his more well-known peers, his sound is a boundary-less mash-up of styles, including juke, footwork and jungle, all polished to a sonic sheen.

Source, Bored Lord's next EP, is out on March 19. Over email and Facebook (because talking on the phone would just be… awkward), I asked the young net artist to break down his URL-fueled work.

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"I've been making art and music hand-in-hand since my early teens, a bit over a decade now. After dropping out of art school and kinda wandering around, I took refuge in digital means of creating and sharing my output. Facebook, Tumblr, and SoundCloud all became my artistic communities.

Gallery Online approached me earlier this year after seeing some of my work through Facebook groups. This is my first art exhibition and I couldn't think of a more appropriate place to host it. It only seems right to display the art alone in the same virtual setting it was inspired from."

"This is the video I made for CYBEREALITYライフ for his release on Rare Nnudes. I also made the artwork for the EP. I interpreted [his work] as musical manifestation of Tumblr, which made me excited. I tried to pull from that virtual realm of computer nostalgia, video games, smart phones, Greek sculpture, and Japanese futurism."

"My art, be it musical or visual, definitely exists in the same abstract realm. They're like brother and sister. I'm usually switching between editing in a 3D program or making a song throughout the day. The artwork on Soundcloud for "In Ecstacy," for example, is very sparse and minimal, a lot like the track.

"'Black Water' was made while I was experimenting with the visual of black water on white backgrounds. With my EP Estridge, I made the artwork before I finished the EP. Then I wrote everything else with that image in mind."

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"Displaying my work online just feels right at this point. I'm very introverted in nature. The internet has always been my source of art, whether it be downloading songs by other unknown musicians or saving photos after digging through Tumblr or Facebook. Everything I now use to make my art is either freeware or pirated software. I use tutorials off forums or YouTube to learn my way through them. This cyclicity is one of the biggest influences on my art."

"This is a video that minivan markus and I collaborated on for motion_correct's release on Rare Nnudes. Symbolism has always fascinated me, how the use of images can convey words or thoughts. Now more than ever, icons and emojis define our world. Its a lot like hieroglyphics or pictographs. I know my work is more than likely going to be seen decorating a Facebook news feed or a Tumblr dashboard.  I try to work with that in mind."

"I'm also heavily influenced by dreams and visions. My favorite work I've done is always a result of some fever dream involving an abstract world or future state of mind. It's hard to explain, but my work is constantly striving to recreate that world."

Bored Lord's Source EP is out on March 19 on Rare Nnudes.Check out Bored Lord's Tumblr for more of his music, videos, and GIFs.

@MichelleLHOOQ