I’m not a huge fan of scary movies. Not because I’m a wuss (who, this sock-you-in-the-face ballsy techno rampager?). Because I have a terrible suspension of disbelief that fails to get sucked in by relentless pop-outs of bloody decapitations and black-irised grandmas. But psych thrillers, the companionless fear of being trapped within your own crippling mind, that is perhaps the scariest concept of all.
Stop Smoking Clinic‘s apathedick has come forth with a particularly off-putting digital album. Swathed in 6-foot-deep, analgesia-drenched cotton, apathedick presents Tristan chord-levels of tonal discomfort, recorded through the depths of a rust-lacquered shower drain and played back through a roadkilled tape recorder. Peering into the maggot-burrowed pages of mildewed looseleaf, we pick out lyrics regarding a tricking of the eyes, a new-age-Cartesian distrust of the senses, projecting sensual similarities onto situationally similar though physically distinct stimuli. Paralyzed by anxiety, an emotional corpse begs bed bugs to be bitten, for some other sensation than the all-encompassing, bottomless pool of slow-wave everyday pain.
