Albums
Persona
2014
Genre: Industrial
Release Date: 2014
By Colin Joyce
Reviewed July 31, 2014
On her latest album, Copenhagen noise artist Frederike Hoffmeier has abandoned the universally bummed out aesthetic that's marked all of her efforts so far. Persona offers disaffection, sexuality, and outright ferocity in addition to the desolation she's offered to date.
Take a brief listen to any of the dusky tunes that Frederikke Hoffmeier has released as Puce Mary, and a startlingly bleak picture begins to form. Grating percussive scraping and nail-on-chalkboard vocalizations dominate her creeping compositions, even as her instrumental work runs the gamut from deafening drones to clattering industrial drum beats. It's a bitter and icy collection of short form pieces and collaborations when taken as a single entity, but her first LP didn't provide a compelling full-length exploration of that tenebrosity. With her new record for Posh Isolation, she's finally figured out how to present her strain of nauseating noise as a totemic, engaging whole.