please follow closely by bottom surgery

Sometimes the only relief from suffering is more suffering. This idea has been suppressed by the sugar pill of consumerist self-care capitalism; but for some types of pain, the only way out is through. I don’t mean this in a “time heals all wounds” sense, but in a literal experience of endorphin-releasing physical agony. And with her new record “please follow closely”, underground cybergrind darling Bottom Surgery discovers new avenues of creative self injury in an attempt to find relief from the banal evils of everyday life in dystopia. This record feels like a violent exorcism gone wrong, noisy ear-splitting riffs and hardcore breakdowns laced with glitchy explosions, all backing Havyn’s shrieks of desperation. Through a Devil-may-care exploration of abandoned shopping malls, reckless drug use, and gated community-crashing sexcapades, Bottom Surgery acknowledges that casually putting oneself in harm’s way can be just as destructive as an active death drive. Yet in Havyn’s tortured pleas for it all to end, in her explicit rejection of bravery, listeners find a soothing feeling of catharsis-by-proxy. For those who understand that, as Phillipa Snow puts it excellently in her book Which As You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment, “pain can be an effective vehicle for profundity, liberation, feminism, subversion, eroticism, humor and divinity,” music like “please follow closely” represents a meaningful search for escape that goes beyond surface-level disassociation. 
- Kalen