exystence club

Doug Dulgarian founded Julia’s War Recordings in 2021 to help his friends release cassettes of the cool music they were making. The Philadelphia musician and They Are Gutting a Body of Water frontman has long demonstrated a fondness towards physical media formats: wearing out CDs in his tour van; dismantling VHS tapes for music videos; and, as a kid, collecting unlicensed remix compilations of tracks by his favorite artists, absorbing an eclecticism that he’d eventually reflect back in TAGABOW’s output.
Since 2017, Dulgarian has grown TAGABOW from its placid, solo origins into one of the decade’s most influential and inventive shoegaze bands; the proof is in Lotto, their bold and relentless breakout LP from last year.

They Are Gutting a Body of Water originally began as the solo project of Doug Dulgarian, who established a digitally enhanced version of shoegaze which frequently detoured into electronic noise interludes and drum’n’bass breakbeats. Eventually, he embraced a full-band format, and became known for shows where the musicians face each other on the floor instead of playing on-stage. LOTTO is the group’s attempt to create a raw, live-to-tape album rather than something engineered and assembled on a computer. The record’s dark, crushing shoegaze songs feature cryptic, fragmented lyrics which offer perspectives on an uncertain life that feels like it’s on the brink of disaster. Many of the songs seem to address drug addiction and other coping…