Himukalt - Dreaming Of A Dead Girl CD (Tesco)

The 2021 vinyl only release finally available as CD and comes in a 6-panel digipak with additional artwork.

Himukalt was born from the obsession, addiction, and the impure thoughts of American noise artist Ester Kärkkäinen. Her impulse for self-destruction, co-mingles with self-discovery, as she confesses broken tales about sex work, manic-depression, social anxiety, dysphoria and psychic parasites. All finally leaving us to languor in her suicidal ideation and conflicted desire to be very, very alone. She swaddles those appropriations from her life and those around her in the aestheticized violence of power electronics and a death-industrial negativity, similar to that of Lille Roger, Atrax Morgue, and Master/Slave Relationship.

If facets from Kärkkäinen’s earlier albums gave you a glimpse of seeing the world of sex workers, Dreaming Of A Dead Girl lets you inside to feel their world. Clandestine, this is a door you close behind you. Through torment and despair, in darkness, a finality dissolves through hope. Metallic fluttering and empty thuds of disregarded heartbeats transmute sounds at times more substantive than the soiled words you are hearing. Yet-in the end-through all the purring, scrambled anxiety, I feel like the defiled have assumed control. Even if just by mentally disconnecting from the physical acts and escaping back, all alone, to a fractured inner psyche “an agony that tore her in two”. – Jhane, Los Angeles, 2021