by Dan Goldin (@paintingwithdan)
Following the release of last year’s odds and ends release, MEMORYBENDS, Sunk Heaven, the solo project of Austin Sley Julian (Sediment Club) is getting ready for it’s next full length, DUD-TECH. Due out on August 21st via Workplace (Content Blocks, Backyard Ritual), the record expands upon the project’s industrial experimentation, lurking deep in atmospheric dread and jarring no wave, everything given its own space to settle. There’s a refined patience to the album. Sure, it’s still noisy, avant-garde, and penetrating, but it does all that with an emphasis on nuance, a transmission of unpredictable shifts. Joined by LEYA/The Dreebs’ Adam Markiewicz (violin) and Zach Rowden (double bass), the trio take a slow burning celestial approach to their own mechanized terror, piercing and contorting reality as it ebbs and flows like the tide.
While the album’s title track and album opener swarmed with an immersive wall of noise, “Starved Divinity,” the record’s second single opts for something a bit more disorientating. Building off an electronic framework where drones move forward and backward in equal measure, Sunk Heaven leans into elements of ambient horror, the subtle nature of the warped noise coming in fits and stabs, unfolding in a haze, rather than an explosion. Even in its restraint, Julian and co. capture a howling intensity, the feeling of an alien lifeform with all intentions unknown.
Speaking about the track, Julian shared:
“In Summer of 2019, I ventured out of the geographic and cultural context of my identity and into the new ruin of old empires. I am an American whose lineage is the product of forced African Diaspora and the colonial erasure of indigenous peoples. Walking alone through the streets of Paris for the first time navigating the entanglement of the kingdoms that have inflicted such pain, warfare & oppression over the majority of the world, the words for “Starved Divinity” came to me like heaves, outbursts, or sudden wounds. The trip itself was formative and immense, but that whole fall and winter of 2019 there was an uncanny rot quality to everything.
Returning to New York it was clear that there was a stillness and festering that would lead to collapse. Everything felt disconnected, haphazard, and unclear. Soon upon my return Terry Turtle, a close friend and half of the formative prolific group Buck Gooter, passed away after a fast moving battle with cancer. This was a huge blow to the music community I had felt at home within. Terry was committed to clearly articulating his message of loving the planet and treating people with respect. In the face of the impending wave of anti-empathy and shortsighted hate that came over America and the world manifesting in a particular din that winter, I held his memory and virtue in my creative hand while reforming and reimagining Sunk Heaven. I felt this message of Terry’s parallel with the colonial predicament, and in this I feel it important to carry Terry Turtle’s name in dedication in this song. I owe a lot to his spirit.
“Starved Divinity” is a declaration of selfhood within the decaying Pillars of Western society and its slow apocalypse. A call to being amidst the leveled homes and the abuse of societal structure. The genocide and murder perpetrated by the western governments and the hand of power and inequity at large against Palestine (mutual aid), Sudan, The Congo, and the majority of the oppressed world. The system is starving and the project has failed, though the shift is painful we will see ourselves in a change in our lifetime.
I wish to thank Evin Huguenin for recording and producing this album with me, Adam Markiewicz for contributing violin on this song, and I would like to dedicate 'Starved Divinity’s release to the memory of Terry Turtle and Làwû (Mango) Makuriye’nte.”
Sunk Heaven will celebrate the album’s release with Content Blocks, Revenge Body, and Cube on August 27th at Trans-Pecos in Queens, NY.