Content Warning: This article discusses suicide and self-harm
Music is a chaotic passion drawing from trauma and joy
In exploring themselves, artists often craft alter-egos and personae that allow them to play with sound.
The characters can be a way to show the deeper recesses of the soul while shielding the artist from being too emotionally vunerable.
It can also anchor the sound to tight pattern, preventing them from becoming unmoored and creatively adrift.
C y n t h o n i
Cynthoni is a Sydney-based electronic musician who has produced under four different personas in there quite short career.
Starting out as Jvnko, Jvne would came out as trans, before Sewerslvt would emerge to reach her greatest popularity.
Her music is dark, chaotic and manic. In a literal sense it feels like mania, a mess of up and down tempo beats that throw you about.
High temp dance music with pounding baselines, distorted screams and distance voices, with track titles like “Nice Ways to Die”, “Kawaii Razorblades”, and her biggest hit “Mr Kill Myself”.
The darkest energy flowed from her personal struggles with her mental health, but in 2021 her partner would take their own life.
Bidding goodbye to fans she would release a final album, “we had good times, don’t forget that”.
Many feared the worst, not only an exit from music but perhaps death as well.
Friends confirmed online that she was still around, just done with Sewerslvt and that part of her life.
Watch my skin erupt in a CYNTHONI of flame
Shocking everyone, under the new name Cynthoni a two part EP would drop on fans with little announcement.
Musically it draws itself away from the darkness that previous albums cultivated.
It’s airy, ethereal synth is more atmospheric, while keeping the harder breakbeat sound they are so known for.
At the same time the darkness is always sitting in the corner, with “Grinding of Teeth” seeing the constant refrain ‘the world is dying’ playing under pounding bass, ending with a distorted scream of static.
In fact the bass almost feels reversed, like the roaring wall of sound falling away with a pounding heartbeat.
“Watch my skin erupt in a CYNTHONI of flame,” repeats at the start of every track, a whisper for help and a cry out in beauty.
Artist persona’s are a feedback loop of sounds and growth.
They shape the artist as they shape the sounds and move away from that persona as it changes.
Sometime we see the artist move away as the persona was something they hated, a dreaded part of them that they don’t want to go back into.
Cynthoni’s two part EP is a return to the scene and I eagerly await what more might be on offer.
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