KNIFEDOUTOFEXISTENCE – I Find Myself Dwelling on the Sick CS

I Find Myself Dwelling On The Sick is 40 minutes of heaving tapework from UK outsider electronics artist Knifedoutofexistence. Over four long form dirges, Dean Lloyd Robinson works through the precariousness of the present, building a tapestry of saturated tone from the rubble of a year claimed by malady and malaise. In this dense work of searing noise, found sound and field recordings from the south coast are gnawed by corroded electronics and submerged in a whirring slipstream of cassette warble.

Piercing tones stretch a present left fallow in the wake of pestilence; the hum and clatter of contracting domestic spaces collide with a spewing stream of consciousness, and the hiss of static claims what remains. Art production here is a daily process — a kind of sonic autofiction. I Find Myself Dwelling On The Sick marks a cryptic entry into the post-industrial plague chronicles, documenting the dark interior of a year embalmed in sickness. The work grew from daily recordings, often committed straight to tape; a series of audio diary entries which captured particular feelings, times and places. The record is entangled with the localities in which it was produced, constructed largely on recycled tapes in bedrooms, at beaches and on buses. Suffused with the faint traces of the ghosted histories stored in these objects and places, the recordings are a multi-textured reflection on the present, in the form of billowing sonic exorcism.

Originally available as a limited merch stall edition of 15 direct from the artist, I Find Myself Dwelling On The Sick is presented here for the first time outside of that context, with mastering coming courtesy of Jack Chuter of Upward, Swallowing and ATTN Magazine. The material emerged from the same set of recordings as the God Spits cassette on Trust Collective, and both releases function as the attempt to come to terms with the instability of a present ravaged by sickness and uncertainty.