Sewerslvt should have been the music playing on the radio in that cyberpunk game that came out in 2020. Not that those kinds of things have anything to do with accurately portraying the future since cyberpunk – in the most platitudinal sense – is always about what is already existent, just as William Gibson’s work had always concerned the cybernetic of the here and now with those ‘Neuromancer’ skies set to ‘the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.’
It is remarkable to think of Sewerslvt as an already dead project, another dead screen revelatory in having died in an ecstatic culture where this dark and challenging music had arrived both too soon and perhaps just in time. The very act of having been put to death by the churchy culture that Sewerslvt attempted to shine a demonic light through is perhaps the very act of immolation this aesthetic had always been destined to achieve.
Perhaps this is why Sewerslvt’s last project was titled ‘goodbye’ in an attempt to disappear on their own terms with an album titled ‘we had good times together, don’t forget that’. There are some people who – like Yukio Mishima before them – are concerned only with what that dark genius once described as an obsession with ‘night and blood and death’, and to quote his ‘The Temple of the Golden Pavilion’, a ‘nihilism that belonged to youth.’
I accept that most listeners are never going to accept Sewerslvt on these literary terms since it is far easier to condemn a person than it is to express any degree of sympathy. And so, a quick succession of Bataillean eyes transition to the endless liminality of backroom doorways in an accompanying audio-visual made for people who might one day understand it. In the end, what most people want in life is an easier route from their misery. The tragedy is that there is none.
