The violence that permeates Possession immediately brought me back to another of Shostakovich’s works, namely Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, recently staged at La Scala in Milan. The connection between the two is not at all arbitrary. Both works revolve around the metaphor of women seeking ideal love then spiralling into murder. Katerina Izmailovna, the protagonist of the opera, is married to a wealthy merchant in Tsarist Russia and falls into the entanglement of a manipulative affair with Sergei, a servant. Overwhelmed by love and by the oppressive boredom of her domestic life, she kills first her father in law and then her husband in order to protect the freedom given by the clandestine relationship. The ending is tragically inevitable. Once betrayed by Sergei, who courts other prisoners, Katerina attempts to murder a rival during their deportation to Siberia. They plunge together into an icy river and die in the same fall. In Zulawski’s film, Mark and Anna meet an analogous fate. After injuring one another both physically and emotionally and after transforming themselves into colliding forces, they die in each other’s arms. Their death, however, is not a release: the creature survives, the humanoid double keeps on walking the earth. 

These two references to Shostakovich and Zulawski shaped my entire sensory perception of the LP. On one side lies the orchestral cacophony, the emotional brutality, the saturated climaxes of Lady Macbeth and the suspended aching moments of the 5th Symphony. On the other side lies the feverish corporeality of Zulawski, the grotesque transformations, the duplication of bodies and the portrayal of love as a force that veers towards horror.

Shostakovich was undoubtedly a singular genius. Lady Macbeth was composed in a matter of months. An entire booklet and orchestral score were created at an impossible pace, without hesitation. Within the opera lie passages of extraordinary sexual cacophony, particularly the scene depicting the attempted rape of a maid. It represents one of the most technically and emotionally complex moments of the work, unfolding as a total confusion of sound, a disturbing energy driven forward by the near orgiastic vocalisations of the soprano. After listening to Sheetnoise in the immediate aftermath of revisiting Lady Macbeth, I recognised a similar intention. Both works strive to generate sound as collision, as excess, as emotional overload that spills over into physical sensation.

Across the LP’s arc, each track unfolds like a chamber in an abandoned industrial complex, beginning with Reactor V, an ethereal, gaseous exhalation in which sound seems to condense and evaporate at once, as though the walls themselves were breathing; this vapour solidifies violently in Tastes Like Metal, where one feels trapped inside a trembling steel chamber, drilled, rattled, motorised, until a single, ill-omened chord strikes like a warning siren, followed by reverberations that stretch into a kind of mechanical lament, wind-driven oscillations making the metal itself weep. Iron Lung Bullet sharpens this tension as violin chords cut through a background distortion that swells like a black hole swallowing the remnants of melody, the poetry of the piece slowly suffocated by a monstrous presence hiding just behind the mix; breathing apparatus clicks into rhythm, the machine is working, and the opening sound, unmistakably a bullet being fired, sets the track on a fatal trajectory, its passage through air rendered with chilling clarity before everything collapses into the silence of its unconsolable impact.