Every Day I Die, by Sardinian artist S4/ creates a dark sonic landscape reflecting personal and societal weight, anxiety, and pain. S4/ writes that the project is meant to provide “an arc of psychological dissolution: from the dread that precedes the day, through decay and collapse, to what remains when there is nothing left to consume.” The album absolutely succeeds in this.
The overall mood of the album is one of abandonment and loss and the tonal colors are all grays and blacks, like you are wandering a broken and desolate city filled with black smoke and a sunless sky. The deep and distant rumble of the opening track, “Dread,” brings you into this world, the darkness fractured by strange skittering sounds and melancholic synths. Are those the sound of footsteps on loose gravel? Is it you or something following you? This sense of both haunting a space and being haunted by a space (or things in that space) is a feeling S4/ returns to throughout.
However, there is also violence here, particularly in the second track, “Sink,” with its explosions and sounds of warfare reflecting on the situation in Gaza and in the ominous wall of noise that opens “Ruin.” There are also the ghosts and strange voices that haunt “Hollow,” leaving you with a feeling of being surrounded by pale specters reaching out for you even as a wall of sound rises up to blot out the world with malevolent distortion.
The harshness on “Hollow” and in other tracks is textural and not often, or at least not for long, a direct assault on the senses. This is a world too tired, too broken down to mount a direct attack on you. Instead you are ushered through a darkness that settles on you, settles into you, and weighs you down from within. Even the sound of a piano, coming as it does toward the end of “Sink,” while initially providing some sense of humanity and connection, quickly shifts to dissonant chords that pull your heart down into despair.
This is not a land of hope. You might grasp for it in the opening of “Wither,” which begins with a melancholic distant melody that feels like there might be a sense of security or shelter from the bleakness. However, that quickly disintegrates, shredded and obscured by a rising sense of skittering anxiety as high-pitched distortion taps out manic patterns like nonsensical Morse code.
Even in the final two tracks, “Drift” and “Air,” you are not really given a reprieve or escape from the bleakness. If anything, the world seems to close in tighter around you. That final track, “Air,” may give us bird song, but it is a bird song that soon distorts and is swallowed up by a cacophony of harsh sounds.
Every Day I Die is not an easy listen. On a casual listen some of the textures and tracks may feel too repetitive, but pay attention and the album presents a coherent and devastating journey through a world that is both frightening and all too emotionally recognizable. It deserves close listening and the attention we might give to the signs and portents of impending destruction.
