Scopophilia
Violent For Being Sexually Desired
Probably one of the strongest releases on OEC of past years! Comes in 6-panel digipak and 12 pages booklet. Debut album by this amazing collaborative project from Harriet Kate Morgan (aka MILITARY POSITION) and Ester Kärkkäinen (aka HIMUKALT). One cannot write about Scopophilia without discussing the female condition, as both artists sublimate their own biographies and biologies into sound - a raw production of power electronics, industrial decadence, and provocative discipline. Although leading different lives in separate countries, the two share a number of similar influences: S.P.K., Atrax Morgue, Brainbombs, Lustmord, Vatican Shadow... Their respective solo work is largely industrial and can be quite minimal in comparison to Scopophilia. In the album's dark techno rhythms, Scopophilia create a unique and completely different sound altogether from their solo work. These tracks are lurid, sensual, intimate, and violent all at once, stirring visual images and narrative fragments through the noise. Both Morgan and Kärkkäinen have a past experiences as sex workers, and they believe this album could be their own private soundtrack to a strip club or a dungeon. The album is more than a synthesis of the bruised noise from Military Position and postmortem electronics from Himukalt, through an uncanny communion of misery, mania, sexual addiction, innate trauma, the loss of self, the aftermath of abuse or controlling situations, the horror of being in a female body and the subsequent feelings of entrapment this brings. The record has an element of complete sadness and abandonment but also embodies some sort of empowerment - a moving forward, a sense of revenge. This album brings forward a definite vignette of female sexuality but framed more as a sort of ailment, a disease, something that isn't desired or warranted and the thoughts that run through one's mind as a result. It acts as a sort of diary, a commentary on their past and their subsequent feelings of disempowerment as well as thoughts on what it is to be a woman and industrial artist.