Choking On A Crunchwrap Supreme As The World Burns | AP045

“Choking On A Crunch Wrap Supreme As The World Burns” brings us Trigger Object at the peak of mastery, channeling and fermenting our collective and individual disgust for the state of the world into a noise seance. The project makes gifts of Trigger Object’s observations in the face of general obliviousness to crisis—a careful record of all that we block out. Her field recordings bring in children playing on a playground in an active, taped-off crime scene; a murder of motorcycles revving on a city street; an afternoon at Best Buy when every alarm in the store went off at once but business continued as usual; a machine slamming a hole into her basement to release poisonous radium decay. Synthesizers add hyperreal texture: duck tape ripped off a mouth.

As always with Trigger Object’s music, you can’t miss the humor. The title track interweaves the snap crackle pop of a snack kingdom with the sentient screeches of machines. The dance track “Cloud of Daggers” brings us into a swarm of insects berserking themselves. Alongside these absurdities is both beauty and ache. In “Untoward Nauseating Unmotion of the Floor,” a celestial choir accompanies a radiant, nervy, ominous procession. “Depression Mold” narrates a slow escape in the dark past the carousing of murderous spirits.

In a world that’s clogging our throats, nothing rotten can be expelled and nothing fresh can be inhaled. Yet for all its despair, the album resonates with the psychedelics of survival and commiseration. Here is her prayer for a collective Heimlich maneuver, an insistence that we might clear the air passage if we squeeze each other hard enough.

-Lola Milholland

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“Trigger Object is the long-running project of Vern Avola, a composer and multimedia artist based in Portland, Oregon. As the title suggests, Crunching On A Crunchwrap Supreme As The World Burns is an attempt at processing the polymorphous poly-crisis currently engulfing us; or rather, an attempt to capture a particular feeling of dazed paralysis or nauseated brain fog it provokes.
Maximalism is one obvious response to the torrent of events, signals and noise, but Avola takes a different tack. Daubs of slow-modulating drone; random, transient snippets of field recording; scribbles of synth; damaged drum hits so widely and irregularly spaced they’re more gestures than beats. In their dissociated, detached un-development these tone poems are more like soundscapes; dim-lit half-spaces slowly, cautiously explored to find the margins.”

Sam Davies, Wire Magazine, Issue 505 – March 2026