SINGLE-MINDED BLASTBEATS: Sikora (Canada) - 5 Torments (2020)

In the first installment of Single-minded Blastbeats - namely, an ongoing exhibition of one-human solo grindworks and other blastbeat-adjacent projects - I present Sikora, aptly powered by Sarah Jane Cooper, member of Minitel, a defunct band of (totally understandable) Discordance Axis worship.

The low, dragging start to Imposter Syndrome is a self-conscious far cry from professed "false grind" clichés, and it certainly doesn't prepare one for the rest of the blasting tracks that grace the EP. Rare breakdowns rain down hard; in fact, they hardly come off as such, carried by a dense, oppressive atmosphere and a modern, wide kind of distortion on the guitar that emphasizes Cooper's penchant for dissonance, mathy as in decidedly amelodic, endowing the whole thing with a gritty, sludge-drenched quality. Pushed together by hammering mechanical (technically digital, I know) blastbeats, 5 Torments is a peculiar slab of cyberviolence with punk character, and if you think a marriage of cybergrind to powerviolence may be your thing, coming at you at an angle of polyamorous "-cores" on the side (luckily free of djent's make-believe complexity), then Sikora may be too. As for the future, there are much harsher and noisier tracks to come, as Cooper kindly divulged, so what else is there to say other than "Fuckin' A?"

Stream or download (NYP/free) @ Bandcamp!

Othen than the aforementioned discordant Minitel, you may also want to check out Sikora's functioning band, Androgyne! Namely, it is "queer as in fuck you," so blastbeats are a given. Furthermore, there is another project in the works with Leda of Vancouver prog death metal act The Hallowed Catharsis on vocals. As Lain says: "No matter where you go, everyone's connected."

I ought to admit that I've never quite understood the allure of breakdowns, but as long as we insist on dumbing down music into genres and subgenres, which is helpful to a point, remember that it's tragic to ostracize criminal amounts of great music from our made-up bubble of 'extreme music done right.' In other words, the tragedy is self-imposed. When you bring all that shit over to the online world you get people calling Gridlink screamo-influenced poser grind, so why even bother? Trust your ears, not labels.