Seven Memories / Human Meat brings Himukalt and Subklinik together in a collaboration that feels less like a split and more like a shared autopsy table. Across its two halves, the record traces a tight arc from psychic excavation to corporeal desecration, turning the body and memory into raw material for a language of diseased electronics, guttural atmospheres and suffocating space. It is an album that treats industrial and death‑ambient not as fixed styles but as solvents, slowly stripping away the protective skin around desire, shame and obsession until only nerve endings and residue remain.
On the opening side, Seven Memories, Himukalt works in her characteristic mode of exposed‑nerve confession and grainy saturation, but the focus is more interior than explosive. Voices – half‑intelligible, half‑drowned – smear into tape hiss and oscillation; pulses emerge then crumble; small, metallic details click and drag across a bed of corroded drones. Rather than narrative, what emerges is a set of recurring emotional weather systems: flashes of erotic charge, episodes of dread, numb stretches where everything feels flattened by overexposure. The “memories” suggested in the title are not neat snapshots but distorted fragments, looping images that refuse to resolve, the kind that haunt rather than inform.
Human Meat, Subklinik’s multi‑part contribution, shifts the axis from psyche to flesh. Here the sound moves toward a cavernous, death‑industrial register: slow‑rolling bass pressure, distant mechanical thuds, textures that resemble damp concrete, rotting metal, surgical suction. Rhythms are barely rhythms at all – more the sluggish insistence of biological processes and industrial systems grinding in parallel. Across its three sections, the suite feels like a descent through layers of a facility: the outer corridors, the operating theatre, the cold room. Any human presence is rendered as stain or echo, implied rather than spoken, which only sharpens the title’s blunt reduction of the body to consumable, discardable matter.
What makes Seven Memories / Human Meat compelling is the way the two artists’ approaches refract each other without collapsing into sameness. Himukalt’s side is all overheard thought and internal monologue, rendered in clipping, saturated electronics that hint at pain and compulsion as much as pleasure. Subklinik answers with a more depersonalised, clinical horror, as if the psychic debris on side A had been scraped off and left to congeal in a subterranean lab. The continuity of tone and pacing means the flip from one to the other feels less like a break than a shift in depth: the same trauma, first from the inside out, then from the outside in.
Issued by a label long invested in power electronics, industrial and related extremities, the record sits comfortably in a lineage of split releases as dialogues rather than simple pairings. Yet it avoids easy genre codification. There are no cathartic blasts, no cartoon violence, no overt shock tactics; instead, both Himukalt and Subklinik work with slow accretion, careful placement of detail, and a kind of negative dramaturgy where what is implied carries more weight than what is explicit. Seven Memories / Human Meat is not an entry‑level release – it presumes a listener willing to stay inside a profoundly uncomfortable atmosphere – but for those prepared to do so, it offers a disturbingly coherent meditation on bodies, memory, and the ways both can be reduced, processed, and left to hum in the dark.
