SkinGASM – “rnodnabyia rsro uu” from the album “Sins”

It’s kind of hard to put into words just how revolutionary Electronic duo and experimental video outfit SkinGASM is. Listening to their debut album “Sins”, you’d be hard pressed to find electronic artists who are boldly crafting the sounds and beats these two are making. The 11-track album is a collaboration between Dexuality Valentino of Skin Vehicles (UK) and ANEURGASM (Miami, Florida). The album is an odd mix of ambience, experimentalism and ear shattering beats that move towards weird places. On a practical level, “Sins” is a challenging and disorientating experience for the uninitiated, as SkinGASM mix in a potpourri of drum n’ bass, harsh noise, glitch, and ambient elements.

The challenge starts immediately with the track titles, where the words have been scrambled into something indecipherable. This removes the only tangible indication of meaning that instrumental music has. In this way, SkinGASM forces you to decipher your very own personal interpretation of the musical pieces contained within this album without the usual title suggestions. So when the project kicks off with, “t k ehliti’iin anwlec hlrr”, you have absolutely nothing to lean on, but the music and your own state of mind.

Musically, too, the album is hard to get to grips with at first, which of course makes the listening experience more stimulating and gives it a much longer shelf life. The concept and process of “Sin”, started as a challenge to overlap two tracks, one from each artist. However, from simply trading stems, the project grew into something much bigger than SkinGASM originally intended.

“It is an act of bravery to allow your work to be completely dismantled and recreated as something else. Sometimes to the point of the original material being barely recognizable anymore,” explained Dex Hannon, on half of SkinGASM. “But without that seed this new music could not exist. It is an act of dismantling the ego,” he concluded. ‘Sins’, the first of three concept pieces currently lined up, is a 42-minute journey of intensely vivid sonic textures able to fluctuate, and alter their musical identities entirely, from bar to bar.

Each track feels assured in its own harmonic direction, bone-crushing percussive excursions, and hallucinatory sonic potential. Mixing ear piercing harsh tones and mellow celestial nuances with brutal industrial beats, SkinGASM lead us into, and beyond the unknown, with tracks such as “rnodnabyia rsro uu” and “liow dseehif hrtieh t n”, which, like the entire album, are supported by psychedelic mind-warping visuals.

Seamlessly swaying between raw aggression and soothing lucidity, the members of SkinGASM, twist, stretch, and manipulate, while superimposing one track upon another. Resulting in fragments of harmonic accordance and then moments of utter dissonance, which ride on explosive irregular rhythmic structures. Along the way, SkinGASM, impressively manage not to compromise on musicality.

The music on “Sins” takes hard left turns, and throws multiple curveballs, while shape shifting with the frequency you would expect from impatient creative minds walking a tightrope extended across an ocean of burning flames. SkinGASM jump between sonic turbulence, aural effervescence and experimental futurism, transforming every musical palette they come across.

With each sound, style and beat searching for significance within a myriad of sonic configurations on “Sins”, there simply is not any room for complacency or redundancy. Alongside mind-bending visual art, this album proves that electronic music can be everything, and the opposite of everything, depending on how you manipulate it, and then interpret it. The former, depends on SkinGASM, the latter, depends on you. As an extra bonus, every album sale on Bandcamp will receive a FREE copy of the 42 minute psychedelic film, SkinGASM created to accompany the album.