Derek Szeto’s experimental audiovisual project SCALD has never been especially interested in prettifying the ugly. Operating from London, Szeto constructs work at the intersection of sound design, visual art, and something closer to ritual. The kind of practice that sits more comfortably in a gallery or warehouse rave than in any tidy genre category. Asphyxia, released via the reliably uncompromising Industrial Coast label, arrives first on cassette on 16th March 2026, with a digital release following days later, and it represents both a document of pandemic-era psychological extremity and a fully realised aesthetic statement.
The EP’s origins lie in a 12-minute cinematic audiovisual work conceived and produced during the chaos of 2020 lockdown. Rather than seeking equilibrium against the anxiety of that period, Szeto made the more artistically courageous decision to burrow further into it, channelling the delirium of disrupted sleep patterns, fractured social contact, and slow civilisational dread into a work of deliberate immersion. 3D-scanned masks, analogue and digital audio tools, and LED-lit warehouse spaces populate a visual world that flickers between the clinical and the haunted. The result is less an album about the pandemic than a visceral re-enactment of being inside it.
That vision would not have taken its full shape without a cast of collaborators whose own artistic sensibilities push Asphyxia in unpredictable directions. The Seer, the alter-ego of dark multimedia artist Conny Prantera, provides deeply unsettling masks and vocals that thread through the project like a presence you can’t quite locate. SWARMM (Liam Noonan) brings a kinetic, boundary-warping violin performance that elevates the original track into something that feels genuinely post-genre. Rounding out the EP are three remixes: from UKAEA (Dan Jones), Waterflower (Sabīne Moore), and Slave 2 Society (Andrew Bowen), each of whom bring their own distinct sonic signatures to the source material with enough conviction that the word “remix” starts to feel inadequate.
Asphyxia opens with its titular original ‘Asphyxia (Lockdown)’ and it announces itself not with a bang but with something more unsettling: a fog. Hazy, flashing, and soaked in the ambient texture of an apocalyptic aftermath. Creepy chanting rises slowly from washed-out static; occasional bleeps and synthetic percussion surface and submerge. SWARMM’s violin warps through the composition like a signal deteriorating mid-transmission. Neither fully electronic nor entirely acoustic, it haunts the upper registers while enormous sub-bass frequencies spread beneath like groundwater flooding a cellar. The Seer’s vocals arrive deep in the mix, gasping rather than singing, buried alive in the noise.
The three remixes that follow present not as afterthoughts, but rather as genuine reinterpretations. UKAEA’s remix has the most immediate impact. At five minutes, it is the EP’s most concise and blunt instrument as a carnival of menace, with demented synths and distorted vocal fragments drive the track into harsh, body-music territory. Where the original unfurls slowly, this version arrives swinging. It lands somewhere adjacent to EBM and industrial club music, all punishing rhythms and queasy melodic fragments that feel like a fairground ride designed by someone with genuinely bad intentions. It is, in the best possible way, deranged.
‘Asphyxia (Slave 2 Society)’ is the EP’s longest and most labyrinthine offering. Andrew Bowen takes the suffocating atmosphere of the original and lets it breathe, but not because relief is coming. The extended runtime is deployed as a weapon, lulling the listener before unleashing ravey, hip-hop-adjacent breakbeats that arrive like a boot through a door. Scratchy techno phrasing and crushed hardware textures make this the most club-oriented piece on the record, and its lurching, physically confrontational energy is genuinely exciting.
Waterflower’s ‘Asphyxia (Break Out)’ is the EP’s most direct and, paradoxically, its most accessible moment. Sabīne Moore brings her voice to the front of the mix and does not flinch. Her performance is confronting and unambiguous, riding hammering electronics and a driving techno pulse with the confidence of someone who has nothing left to lose. “Don’t tell me what you believe in” rings out across the track’s five minutes with the force of a provocation. It is the EP’s most immediate point of entry, and its most politically charged, making explicit what the original leaves in shadow.
The EP is not without challenges. Its origins as a single audiovisual work mean the four-track format requires a certain willingness to re-approach familiar material from different angles, and listeners seeking melodic consolation will find none. But for those willing to meet it on its own terms, Asphyxia offers something increasingly rare: an experimental release that is genuinely experimental, built from a specific psychological and historical moment, and executed with the craft and conviction to make that moment matter.
Six years on from the events that spawned it, the EP arrives not as nostalgia but as evidence and as a record of what it felt like when the walls moved in, rendered in frequencies that still press against the chest.
Stream all four tracks on SoundCloud: Asphyxia EP
Browse the full Industrial Coast catalogue on Bandcamp: industrialcoast.bandcamp.com
Keep up with SCALD at scaldprocess.com and on Instagram at @scaldprocess. Follow the label at @industrialcoast.
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