Threshold of Discomfort / Fujimine’s Rituals of Violence

Spotlight on the debut EP

A dense and immersive sonic descent through violence and transformation. In eight fractured compositions, Fujimin sculpts a ritual space for identity to collapse and reassemble, haunted by ambient dread, metallic dissonance, and the ghosts of industrial rhythm.

To enter Fujimine’s debut EP Threshold of Discomfort is to step into a shifting terrain: fractured, unstable, where no rhythm holds still, where breath is replaced by signal, and signal dissolves into smoke. The sonic matter here behaves like weather, like a fever that doesn’t burn but chills.

Already from the first seconds of the first track Constant Altered State, the listener is given a single directive: lose your orientation. Glitchy interruptions crawl into view, almost imperceptibly, like errors in perception, then dissolve into distortion, which swells and contracts until it finds an irregular pulse. What holds the piece together is not structure, but texture: feedback loops that mimic wind, echoed reverbs that emerge from below ground. It feels like ascending into another realm, but the further we go, the more evident it becomes that we’re not going up, but rather we’re sinking. The coordinates have inverted. We are descending into something that isn’t hell, but memory. Perhaps, they’re the same.

If the first track opens the gate, Hope marks our arrival into the underworld proper. The atmosphere is suspended and heavy. The sound becomes descriptive, giving matter to an environment that manifests itself through metallic groans emerging from the dark, evoking chains that are rusted, semi-submerged, attached to machinery long abandoned. It may be an impression, but there is also the presence of stagnant water that as the track progresses slowly starts to remember what movement feels like. The proof that what the track is describing is not a dead world. It breathes. Slowly, but it does. Something stirs within it and it’s an invisible current that begins to activate all that debris.

The transformation begins. Mutation of a Monster emerges from this subterranean quiet with a new rhythm: tribal, pulsing, ritualistic. It feels as though we’ve moved into a forest, though no forest exists, just the hallucination of one. The drumming begins as bodily, earthy, but soon succumbs to synthetic erosion. As the track builds, the percussion becomes more compulsive, trembling, recursive as if the ritual itself is accelerating the mutation. There is something alive here, but we don’t know what it is yet. The monster is forming, or perhaps awakening.

This tension gives way to round 1, the moment when confrontation becomes unavoidable. It is one of the most narrative-driven pieces in the sequence. The space narrows. The listener is placed at the centre of what sounds like an arena. Loops intensify. Metallic clashes return, this time under the form of true weapons. They are sharper, more deliberate. A fight begins, but the opponent is still out of frame. Then comes Unhinged Violence, and it no longer matters who the enemy was. This is the climax, the real moment of rupture inside the EP. The structure disintegrates into a feral blur. The beast has taken over, but in the violence, recognition dawns: the creature that had to be fought was not other. It was the self. The confrontation was internal all along. The enemy was a mirror and there isn’t anything more terrifying than this revelation.

Banality of the Evil could be perceived as the aftermath of that burst of violence and the chaos returns again with Ego Magick, which reclaims the wreckage of identity through ritual. The piece is built around a notion from Aleister Crowley, who understood ritual not as mysticism, but as deliberate self-transformation. Here, loops act like incantations, and distortion transmutes the track, channeling the ghost-circuits of Coil and the spectral geometry of Genesis P-Orridge’s industrial spiritualism.

Then When Feeling in One’s Bones is the closing gesture. It begins with a sound that, probably affected by the title itself, feels like knocking on the inside of a rigid, empty body, like someone searching for what’s still intact after everything has been broken down. Even if it’s soft and calm, such repetition is not comforting: it is uncertain, suspended between a checked collapse and a possible reawakening.

As Fujimine herself has said, Threshold of Discomfort is a ritual of purification, not a healing in the traditional sense, but a metabolising of violence. Especially the violence carried by the female body, the psychic wound of being exposed, split, reshaped. It’s an EP that doesn’t offer peace, it doesn’t soothe, but gives form to the wound that the artist carries within, and through that form, it begins to shout.

Fujimine Nasty Magazine Antonio De Masi 7