Postmortem
Duration: 26 minutes
Postmortem, the latest work from Portuguese born, Berlin based artist SOF, marks a foundational gesture ahead of his full-length debut Lub, due in fall 2025 via a collaboration between Soft Commodity and the independent label Perf. Operating as a solitary project in the interstice of sonic aggression and conceptual inquiry, SOF constructs a personal vocabulary through a rigorous engagement with chaos, rupture, and the systemic failure of peace.
Entirely composed of original material, Postmortem unfolds in two interrelated movements. The first, a 21 minute composition, forms the core of the work: an immersive acoustic field shaped by abrasion and instability. This is abruptly interrupted by the arrival of Lub, the first officially released single and namesake of the forthcoming LP. Together, these parts form a dialectical structure: collapse followed by confrontation, disintegration followed by emergence. The transition between them suggests not resolution but a logic of fracture that nonetheless binds the whole.
In its opening chapter, Postmortem draws the listener into a claustrophobic, entropic soundscape: metal guitar shards, collapsing organ drones, cathedral bells, distorted growls, agonised vocalisations, each element part of a dense and dissonant continuum. More than abstraction, this sonic environment becomes an allegory for contemporary psychic and sociopolitical pressure. Themes of existential anxiety, cultural and religious conditioning, political stasis, and inherited identity surface throughout. The concept of peace, summoned only to be dismantled, appears as a hollow, spectral ideal.
With the onset of Lub, the work enters a new terrain. If the first movement speaks to collapse and constraint, Lub offers a defiant act of self-affirmation. It is not resolution but confrontation, an individual assertion rising from the ruins. This second movement signals a turn toward speculation, a questioning of normativity, mortality, and ethics. It does not provide closure but proposes autonomy as an emergent, radical possibility.
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SOF appeals to a revolution of consciousness, values, self-awareness, and self-worth through themes of radical political, social, and cultural destruction, alongside a deep skepticism toward heritage and religion. At the bottom of this emotional and creative core lies a profound fascination with chaos, not as abstraction, but as a social response. Psychotic and impenetrable, the practice holds close to the languages of aggression and disorder, using them as tools to question the logics of human morality, mortality, and ethics.
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Perf, Sonic Rituals and Speculative Futures
Perf is not just a label, it is a curator of metaphysical thresholds, and a conduit for the esoteric edges of contemporary experimental music. Emerging from Portugal’s fertile underground, exists at the nexus of ritual and futurism serving as both an amplifier and an incubator for artists who explore the boundaries of sound.
Launched with the debut of Amuleto Apotropaico, Perf revealed its grounding in sonic mysticism and the deeply regional. That release–drawn from years of live ritual and sculpted into a brutalist liturgy of rhythm and density–set a tone: one of noise-as-ceremony, of improvisation as invocation. Amuleto Apotropaico, with their roots in the folklore of Northern Iberia and their ears turned toward the abyss, offer a kind of time-looped spirituality, where each beat is both ancient and entirely new. Perf gave that project its home, not as a document of nostalgia but as a construction of myth in real time. But Perf's vision is no less futuristic than it is ancestral.
The label’s release of Jonathan Uliel Saldanha’s Surface Disorder further cements its position at the frontier of synthetic and speculative sound. Saldanha's work, spanning installation and composition, is paranoid, post-human, and devastatingly meticulous. With AI oracles (The Mouth), morphing sonic detritus, and digital fever dreams, Perf gives voice to a broader fascination with the uncanny and the apocalyptic sublime. Here, sound isn’t just expressive, it’s viral, generative, and recursive.
What unites these releases is a commitment to sound as praxis: noise as a system of belief, signal as transformation, distortion as architecture. Whether through the rhythmic invocations of Amuleto Apotropaico or the cybernetic hauntings of Uliel Saldanha, Perf fosters a catalogue that treats audio not merely as content, but as event–an unfolding, an encounter, a revelation.
Perf isn’t building a scene, it’s creating a realm.
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