“Pain recordings” is a complex sound collage that delves into the fragments of memory emerging from personal relationships. Blending electronica, industrial, drone, noise, and bass music, the album offers an abstract and evocative experience, where traces of human connections manifest in structured forms.

This double album plays with the abbreviations M. and J., drawing from Robert Smith’s approach in the track “M” from “Seventeen Seconds”. The song references Albert Camus’ novel “La Mort Heureuse”, where the character Patrice Mersault feels jealous of his girlfriend Marthe’s other lovers, beginning with the phrase Hello image.

The album’s focus is not on raw emotion but rather on the ways memories—fuzzy, distorted, and at times disorienting—filter into consciousness. Each track acts as an autonomous yet interconnected fragment, reconstructing the vestiges of human interactions. Industrial landscapes, deep basslines, and the raw textures of noise create an unsettling atmosphere, where sounds echo past moments, reconstructed and deconstructed in a sonic quest for meaning through drone.

The music of “Pain recordings” embraces a fragmented sonic aesthetic, in which rhythms and melodies emerge and disappear like memories dissolving over time. It’s a work that captures the incomplete and fleeting nature of memory, offering an experience that is as challenging as it is hypnotic. Listeners are invited to navigate these passages of broken sounds and saturated textures, finding their own interpretations in what lingers between the sounds.

Rather than presenting a linear narrative, the album unfolds as a mosaic of sounds that invite reflection on the fragility of memory and how past events are reconstructed in fragmented ways in our minds. “Pain recordings” is, ultimately, an experimental sonic exercise, where relationships and memories become raw material for an exploration that feels as cerebral as it is emotional.

Joan Lavandeira aka randomVOLT
(Barcelona, España / Spain. December 2024)