Skin = Deception is distinct from the music he has released online—minimal with maximum impact, insidious and scary.
[Release page] Must Die Records is a one-year-old English imprint with a smirking red and yellow logo. Although insisting on marketing itself as a noise label, its small but unruly discography features some real finds of truly varied styles.
Get past the badly blinking porno arcade neon sign that welcomes you at the entrance to Radioactive Snuff by Nigel Joseph, and you make your way to a strangely attractive kind of rhythmic industrial music with repulsive titles but deceptively musical layers. Bad Suburban Dream’s Highways is a lone guitar desperate to connect. And King Summat Sound vs [Soup] features three bouncy, friendly electronic dub tracks by the former that are then roughed up and left bleeding in the alley by the latter.
But in the unique diction of Skin = Deception, Must Die may have discovered its first true prodigy. Christof Becu from Brugge emerged only last year as recording artist Bedawang, but he has already produced a hefty amount of material for various netlabels, soundclouds and bandcamps.
Skin = Deception is distinct from the music he has released online—minimal with maximum impact, insidious and scary. “Tungiasis”—all tracks are named after afflictions of the epidermis, a morbid joke given the smooth-skinned nude gracing the cover—creeps toward the listener and undermines his sense of well-being. “Hypertrichosis” pulses weakly and irregularly, its life ebbing away. On “Dematographia,” a machine sputters like a guttering flame and tries to transmit one last communiqué.
It is music you want to give a wide berth, particularly the twenty-five minute closing track “Blaschko’s Lines,” which hums and bristles with carcinogenic electricity.
Skin = Deception is available on Must Die. [Release page]
