I keep coming back to this. I put on Blawan's recent work and I sit with it in a way that I don't sit with most electronic music, because it's asking me to sit — it's demanding something other than movement, other than the absorbed distraction of the dance floor, other than the pleasant suspension of ambient. It's asking me to think about what it means to hear something that sounds like things ending.
There's something unsettling about how good this is. Blawan has been making industrial techno since the early 2010s and his trajectory has been one of progressive intensification — each phase harder, more demanding, less willing to meet the listener halfway. The recent work is his most extreme and most honest, and honest is the word I keep landing on, because the music feels like an accurate record of something rather than a stylistic position, like someone who has looked at the current historical moment and made sound from what they saw.
Industrial music has always been about the sounds of labour and violence and mechanical force — the aesthetic was built on that foundation in the 1970s and 1980s, Throbbing Gristle and SPK and Test Dept and all the others who understood that the factory's noise was also a kind of music, and that making it audible in an art context was a form of truth-telling. Blawan's techno inherits this. The kick drums are too heavy. The percussion sounds like machinery at the edge of breaking. The textures are hostile in ways that feel meaningful rather than arbitrary.
The End of Something
I want to be careful about apocalypticism, because the aesthetic of ending is easily applied as posture without any substance behind it, and apocalyptic music has a tendency toward grandiosity that can substitute for actual depth. Blawan's music doesn't feel grandiose. It feels specific. The sense of ending it creates is not the theatrical ending of a dystopian film — it's quieter and more matter-of-fact than that, which is more disturbing. It sounds like the kind of ending that arrives without announcement.
What's ending? I genuinely don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe something specific that I'm importing from outside the music and the music is simply providing a container for. But the feeling of something late-stage, something running through its last cycles, is there in the production — in the way sounds decay before they're finished, in the rhythmic structures that seem to be winding down rather than building up, in the overall temperature of the record, which is cold in the way that specific kinds of hopelessness are cold rather than hot.
On Music That Doesn't Comfort
Most music is in some sense consolatory. It offers company, or rhythm to organise your body around, or beauty, or the feeling of being understood. Even sad music tends to console — it names the sadness, and the naming is its own form of comfort. Blawan's music doesn't offer this. It's not trying to make you feel better. It's not trying to make you feel anything in the received sense of feeling-as-relief. It's creating a sonic environment that is honest about something and asking you to be in that honesty with it.
This is an unusual ask. Most people, understandably, don't go to music for that. Music is where you go to get through the day, or to celebrate, or to process difficult things in a safe container. Music that refuses to be safe is asking something more demanding. I can't put it on every day. I can't put it on when I need something from music rather than having something to give it.
But when I can give something — when I have the surplus of attention and stability to be in difficult music without it becoming too much — Blawan's recent work is where I go. It meets the darkness with something that understands the darkness. That's rarer than it should be. I keep coming back to it, slowly, carefully, on the right nights.
The music doesn't want anything from you except your honest attention. It isn't trying to be liked. It isn't performing extremity to prove a point. It's simply making sound that corresponds to something real and asking you to sit in that correspondence for as long as you can. Some nights I can sit longer than others. On the nights I can, it changes something. That's enough.
