Listening Room / Music at the Edge

The liminal zones between collapse and transformation, ritual and noise, beauty and decay. Whether through meditative erosions, or glitch-drenched liturgies, the music featured in this edition is united by its commitment to disobedience, its resistance to order, and its ability to turn rupture into revelation. In this edition: Ulver, Kashaiof, The Pleasure Majenta, Gertie Adelaido.

Ulver – Blood Inside

Emerging from a group once synonymous with Norwegian black metal, the album offers no allegiance to its origins. And yet, one could argue that this radical mutation represents not a betrayal, but a speculative fulfillment of black metal’s avant-garde potential.
Released in 2005, this album by Ulver is a fever dream dressed as a cathedral. A decadent, disobedient baroque opera filtered through glitch, jazz, and warped pop sensibility.
Almost twenty years on, it still feels ahead of its time. Or maybe just out of it. A grand guignol of broken liturgies and 21st-century dread.

Ulver 2010 © Agnieszka Zwara | handoneye.com

Photography: Lars K. Lande

Kashaiof – Days

Kashaiof’s Days unfolds with the quiet assurance of an artist deeply attuned to the poetics of decay. It inhabits a liminal zone between endurance and disappearance, inviting the listener into a temporality that feels both stretched and suspended.
Across a sparse, low-lit sonic landscape, Kashaiof doesn’t so much build songs as grow them—allowing textures to bloom in the shadow of negative spaces before receding back into a kind of meditative decay.

Photography: Dana Decktor

The Pleasure Majenta – Looming, The Spindle

There are bands that perform, and then there are bands that haunt. The Pleasure Majenta belongs firmly to the latter.
Their 2022 release, Looming, The Spindle, is a scorched earth manifesto of post-punk dread and noise-drenched catharsis. The group channels the wild-eyed nihilism of The Birthday Party, the metallic hypnosis of Suicide, and the ritualistic drone of early Swans—yet their sound remains distinctly their own: feverish, cinematic, and wholly unhinged.
A transmission from a doomed world where language is just another thing breaking apart.

Photographer: Noah Swan

Photographer: Zeb Ringer

Photographer: Noah Swan

Gertie Adelaido

Operating at the outer edges of contemporary sonic resistance, Gertie Adelaido describes their work as “meta-punk” and “ADHD-core.”
They collapse distinctions between noise, metal, hardcore, and electronic disruption into a volatile aesthetic of refusal.
Their track “RESPECT EXISTENCE OR EXPECT RESISTANCE”, released on Psych Tent 2023 via Stoned To Death Records, is a throat-scorching manifesto that arrives like a long overdue mutation of Atari Teenage Riot’s late-’90s cyber-anarchy.

Photographer: Cáry mlhy

Photographer: Michał Patycki

Narrow minded

Fashion | Exclusive

September 13, 2022

Walk through the threshold, overtake old boundaries, be open to your new self. A fashion story photographed by Oxygen Gao, starring Kai and Xiaoyuan.

Ahead of Upclose / A chat with MARRØN

Music | Interview

May 12, 2025

In the pulsating world of techno, few artists infuse rhythm with roots like MARRØN. Drawing from his rich Surinamese heritage and the unyielding spirit of the Maroon people, he transforms dance floors into spaces of remembrance, resistance, and radical joy. Ahead of his much-anticipated appearance at Upclose 2025, he continues to push boundaries through projects like NDYUKA, his storytelling podcast series, and Eerste Communie, the Sunday ritual that redefined Amsterdam’s party culture, he doesn’t just play music — he reclaims history, challenges norms, and amplifies voices often left unheard.

Lee Ann Roberts / We are all connected

Music | Soundscapes

September 22, 2023

In conversation with Lee Ann Roberts. From her duality between making music and managing her label NowNow Records to some consideations about the production process and insights into her past, as well as exciting future projects like her second label night at ADE this year in October. She’s not just a pioneer in the electronic music scene, but a driving force behind her evolution.