pshkn - everything I had seen and remembered

 

Released: January 10

Everything I had seen and remembered is a dark and grimly journey into the world of obscene nightmares. The entire premise of the album is the personal experience of Warsaw-based artist pshkn after being given medicine to help him sleep. It sounds like it should be the premise of a sci-fi/horror thriller and the music that arises from this premise embodies it so well that it practically screams it out loud. Harsh and grimy industrial sounds construct everything in the album with a certain amount of subtle rage. The titles of the tracks are numbered as “MOne,” “MTwo,” “MThree,” and so on, giving an ordered ambiguity to what you hear through its runtime. 

It all feels very dreamlike for sure, opening up with the first track we are brought in with a heavily distorted drone. It feels very akin to the hum of an ungrounded circuit. It wavers a bit, giving higher and lower pitches but retaining this deep undercurrent of low tones. It feels rather foreboding as it slowly moves along, until the even more heavily distorted strikes and hits come in to the picture, slamming up against the more restrained nature of the track. It’s a theme that reoccurs quite often in the album as a whole, at least in varying degrees. “MFour” later inverts the order of this theme, starting off with haunting harmonies that feel especially sinister and only later does the deep drone come in. But as the drone comes in, so too does the harmony begins to slowly shift as well. It feels as though it is growing and forming a long tail of distortion, one that attempts to linger long after the original sound is gone. 

The album is just perfectly frightening as a whole. It does not try so hard as too be trite but it also doesn’t underdeliver on its nightmarish premise. It is ugly in the best way possible, with a certain penchant so sounding destructive while not overbearing, A well-balanced bit of a noisy album.