Misery//Pleasure operates in the territory where dark ambient, harsh noise, and power electronics blur into something closer to ritual than genre. It’s a project built around themes of obsession, anxiety, and bodily collapse, where extreme performance and abrasive sound design function as outlets for suffering rather than simple provocations. Psychology of Sickness follows the project’s debut, Trapped in Life, released via Brachliegen Tapes, and arrives now on Venalism.
Where the debut dealt in broader existential confinement, this record is rooted in something far rawer and more specific: month after month spent at the bedside of a partner battling a rare genetic illness. The album draws directly from that experience, the dread of respiratory wards, the routine brutality of surgical procedure, and the strange intimacy of medical experimentation, then rendering it through a chain of contact mics, degraded analogue circuitry, vintage health-video samples and warped cassette layers. Mastering comes from Foul Prey, with additional production assistance on the second track from Kiahn Zamini, while the artwork is handled by Sin of the Father.
Psychology of Sickness doesn’t so much begin as condense out of the atmosphere, like fog settling in the midst of the night. Many of its pieces bleed into one another, less a sequence of discrete tracks than a single mass of cloud cover that thins, thickens, and reforms across the runtime. This is a record built on accumulation, its noise doesn’t arrive as much as it seeps, infects, and settles.
‘Excretions of the Diseased’ sets the tone early, its opening sample carrying the brittle, degraded quality of an old deadpan institutional recording, faintly obscene in its banality. From there it tips into one of the album’s heavier waves of dread, grim and bilious. ’30ml Airleak’ continues the clinical self-reference, its noise ambience measured and almost procedural, as though following a chart.
‘Nurse – Patient Interaction’ is among the record’s most effective moments. Its recurring, almost luminous drone recalls the more disquieting end of Nurse With Wound‘s catalogue, minimal but deeply unsettling. Its inclinations to illness reminiscent of Atrax Morgue and the more contemporary, Pharmakon. Processed vocal samples cut through sharp, shuddering electronics, and the track’s atmosphere lingers in the room long after it’s ended, an album highlight by some distance.
The record’s first half can feel slightly undifferentiated with ‘Neuropathy’ and ‘Sputum’ folding into each other with a sameness that borders on numbing, though given the subject matter, that numbness reads as deliberate rather than accidental. It’s the back half where Psychology of Sickness truly opens up. ‘Emesis’ brings cracked, growling electronics and piercing high frequencies that cut through the murk with real urgency. ‘Pain Management’ is where the album’s industrial backbone becomes most apparent. With a relentless, unyielding pace, its ringing high tones thread the rumble like pain that’s been dulled but never extinguished, suppressed without ever being resolved.
The closing ‘Terminality’ offers no resolution, no catharsis, only surrender. By this point, any notion of acceptance feels like a luxury the record has already stripped away; what remains is despondency without agency, an ending that simply happens to you.
Psychology of Sickness is a difficult, harrowing listen, and rightly so. This is not a record interested in offering comfort or distance from its subject matter. Its strongest stretch arrives once the back half introduces a wider sonic palette, lending the album’s bleakness texture rather than monotony. This is drone and noise used not for atmosphere alone, but as a vehicle for something uncomfortably specific and real. It’s a stark, unflinching document of illness, institutionalisation, and the slow erosion of resolve. Psychology of Sickness stands as one of the more quietly devastating releases in this corner of the underground this year.
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Released on Venalism
Mastered by Foul Prey
Artwork by Sin of the Father
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