Postmortem, 2025
Duration: 26 minutes

Postmortem, the latest work from Portuguese born, Berlin based artist SOF, marks a foundational gesture ahead of his full-length debut Lub, due in fall 2025 via a collaboration between Soft Commodity and the independent label Perf. Operating as a solitary project in the interstice of sonic aggression and conceptual inquiry, SOF constructs a personal vocabulary through a rigorous engagement with chaos, rupture, and the systemic failure of peace.

Entirely composed of original material, Postmortem unfolds in two interrelated movements. The first, a 21 minute composition, forms the core of the work: an immersive acoustic field shaped by abrasion and instability. This is abruptly interrupted by the arrival of Lub, the first officially released single and namesake of the forthcoming LP. Together, these parts form a dialectical structure: collapse followed by confrontation, disintegration followed by emergence. The transition between them suggests not resolution but a logic of fracture that nonetheless binds the whole.

In its opening chapter, Postmortem draws the listener into a claustrophobic, entropic soundscape: metal guitar shards, collapsing organ drones, cathedral bells, distorted growls, agonised vocalisations, each element part of a dense and dissonant continuum. More than abstraction, this sonic environment becomes an allegory for contemporary psychic and sociopolitical pressure. Themes of existential anxiety, cultural and religious conditioning, political stasis, and inherited identity surface throughout. The concept of peace, summoned only to be dismantled, appears as a hollow, spectral ideal.

With the onset of Lub, the work enters a new terrain. If the first movement speaks to collapse and constraint, Lub offers a defiant act of self-affirmation. It is not resolution but confrontation, an individual assertion rising from the ruins. This second movement signals a turn toward speculation, a questioning of normativity, mortality, and ethics. It does not provide closure but proposes autonomy as an emergent, radical possibility.

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