ANA FOSCA - Poised at the Edge of Structure (2022)

ana fosca has emerged as presence to be reckoned with. here stands a woman raging, wrestling, communing, and plainly preoccupied with the humanity's propensity for tragedy, violence, and blight. and it is with a particular strain of noise - one that is dour, miserable, frightening - through which she harnesses these conditions. while her catalogue of recordings is brief, ana fosca (born linn hvid) honed her craft by performing on a constant basis throughout denmark, sweden, and germany, especially through the dynamic community of mayhem in her native copenhagen. the feral expressionism she developed in performance is matched by a numerous, existential and conceptual antecedents that inform fosca's work. kirkegaard. plath. tarkovsky. hannah arendt. vienna aktionism. eliane radigue's approach to listening. the films of kurt kren. the thoughts and writing of simone de beauvoir.

poised at the edge of structure marks fosca's debut for the helen scarsdale agency, following a very limited cassette on the russian imprint nazlo and a collaboration with vanity productions on no rent. on this recording, she evinces her gesamtkunstwerk as ana fosca in all of its harrowing portent. she composes along cyclonic patterns of oppositional forces, searing noise, and ominous drone. when employing her voice, fosca bellows repetitive chants deep in the mix, a cathartic incantation where meaning can found within all of this agony and despair. the "mathematics of grief" is a phrase that fosca uses in describing this album that amplifies her personal experiences with loss to expound upon the human condition at large. this album never settles into the tropes of power electronics, dark ambient, death industrial, or studied electro-acoustic practices, but absorbs the most impactful facets to all these aesthetics. coming out of the danish underground scene, her work finds common ground with the early, savage sounds of posh isolation, adjacent to puce mary in terms of similarly fraught psychological proclamations, but leaning into the violent miasma of maeror tri / troum at their most industrial.