She Spread Sorrow - Mine LP

Label: Cold Spring

Our Review:

Alice Kundalini's She Spread Sorrow is one of several exemplary projects authored by women who radically engage the aesthetics from industrial culture. Puce Mary and Pharmakon may have achieved critical acclaim and wider recognition for their work; but other contemporary artists such as She Spread Sorrow, Sewer Goddess, Himukalt and Relay For Death count amongst the growing number of women who are composing with noise and power electronics, whose results are as interesting as (if not better than) their male colleagues. Mine is the second album for She Spread Sorrow, who retains the whispered vocal poetics that were present on the debut Rumspringa. Kundalini pushes her sibilant utterances to the foreground of the compositions that she stacks with strident electronics, power-drone aggression and chunks of metal scraped upon concrete and bone. The overblown amplification of the whisper harkens to the French duo Etant Donnes, with Kundalini's approach exaggerating the threat of seduction through her own perceptions and poetics on the nature of femininity. It is as if she gazes into a broken mirror, with her own body (which could be a surrogate extending to all women) as a site of cruelty, desire and disgust as viewed both from within and by the gaze of another. Kundalini's production stands solidly on death-industrial idioms from the likes of Anenzephalia, Puce Mary and Atrax Morgue, with belicose noise, anxiously claustrophobic gloom, and an obsessive discipline sweltering on this unblinking album. Limited to 300 copies.