Dates
| November 4 2023 | Kino Club Lapinlahden Lähde, Helsinki |
HYENAZ’s COLUMNS confronts the violence of historical curation—the way militarized power and historiographic gatekeepers enshrine “events” and “personae” while erasing those deemed inconsequential. The track’s industrial techno veneer belies its organic origins: vocalizations and percussion recorded in a limestone cave near Poland’s pilgrimage nexus, Czestochowa, in collaboration with saxophonist Bartlomiej Kuzniak. Part of their Foreign Bodies series, the work shapeshifts field materials gathered in refugee camps, migrant transit zones, and pilgrimage routes—sites where bodies are surveilled, regulated, and obliterated.
Released via Canadian label OBSKUR MUSIC with remixes by Lady Maru, Bad Conscience, Consumer Refund, and NVRS, COLUMNS is paired with a video collaboration between HYENAZ, Xenia Østergård Ramm, and Hackstage collective’s Old Erik. Using analog glitch processing, the visuals decompose footage of Harz Mountain stalactites, skeletal trees, and whirring turbines—a digital entropy mirroring the track’s themes of historical disintegration.
The vocals functions as a choral palimpsest. Its evocation of decomposing leaves and scattered bodies rhizomatically connects to the video’s destabilized geometries: HYENAZ insists that seemingly fixed systems, forest ecologies, nationalist histories, electronic beats are susceptible to collapse beneath the weight of entropy. The violence of “white lines” (borders, soldiers in columns) inevitably dissolve into an ambivalent stillness.
By sourcing sound from caves—spaces where stalactites “record” millennia in mineral drips—HYENAZ literalizes their critique of historiography. Here, the organic percussion becomes a counter-archive, its rhythms rejecting the fallacy of linear progress. The violence of “white lines” (borders, concertina wire, colonial maps) dissolves into what the poem terms stillness: not peace, but the cosmic indifference awaiting all human ordering projects.
Credits
| Music & Concept | HYENAZ |
| Saxophone & Cave Recordings | Bartłomiej Kuźniak |
| Visual Art & Processing | Xenia Østergård Ramm, Old Erik (Hackstage Collective) |
| Source Footage and Video Edit | HYENAZ |
| Remixes | Lady Maru, Bad Conscience, Consumer Refund, NVRS |