featuring Die Form — Die Puppe (1982), Crystal Castles — “Doe Deer” (2010), ftshsm and Dayerteq — “Beztebya” (2023)

Die Form’s Die Puppe (1982): a doll with a syringe on the cover, a mainspring where the melodies should be, and one of my favourite upbeat industrial records.

what holds me first in Die Puppe is the writing, and above all the drums — hard, machine-exact, with no human hand anywhere in them, laid down with a precision that never once loosens and driving the record forward like a mechanism that cannot be talked out of its task. it is upbeat and it is merciless at the same instant, which is a very particular pleasure, and a rare one.

my favourite is “Invalid.” the voice on it puts me in mind of Genesis P-Orridge — not a borrowing, nothing imitated, but a likeness in the grain itself, the same raw stuff the voice seems to have been poured from. and beneath it, everywhere on the album, run sounds like the mainspring of a music box: a thin metal coil tightening and easing, wound and let go, the noise a doll would make from the inside.

which can hardly be a coincidence, because there is a doll on the cover — a doll with a syringe. a thing built to imitate the living, and a needle going into it. the whole record turns out to be that image rendered in sound: something mechanical made to move, made to sing, made very nearly to feel, the spring audible inside it the entire while. one of the most upbeat industrial albums i know, and one of the saddest, and it will not once admit to being either.

it belongs, for me, to a private category — the music my body will only let in when it is sick. years ago, in the depths of a flu, “Doe Deer” by Crystal Castles used to cure something in me: the fever wanting precisely that abrasion, that battered euphoria, and at no other time of the year.

special mention: songs for fever (ᵕ–﹏–)🌡️

two more things have come back to me these last weeks, as autumn arrives and brings the season of colds and fevers with it — and though they are little like Die Form, they belong to the same strange kinship, the one i can only call the fever family: ftshsm, a rave held live beneath a bridge, and Dayerteq’s “Beztebya” — slowed and drowned in reverb until it reaches you through a wall of water. it should not work, and it does, exactly the way you crave ice cream for a sore throat: the cure made of the same cold as the hurt.

relatedSounding 016 — Gloss & Eggshell