Asymmetrical Hearing: Notes from a Sbilenco Ear
- 14 Dec, 2025 *
Eight tracks, nine minutes. It throws me straight back to the golden days, the ’90s, when grindcore had a clear target to aim at and unload its criticism and rage. Today it feels like that again—though it’s genuinely harder. It’s difficult to identify a distinct “enemy” when we’re anesthetized by consumption and diluted into an obsession with social appearance, drifting away from any shared social feeling we might recognize ourselves in.
Rotten Sound deal with exactly this. With fury and technique (a few more musical rough edges would have made them more huma…
Asymmetrical Hearing: Notes from a Sbilenco Ear
- 14 Dec, 2025 *
Eight tracks, nine minutes. It throws me straight back to the golden days, the ’90s, when grindcore had a clear target to aim at and unload its criticism and rage. Today it feels like that again—though it’s genuinely harder. It’s difficult to identify a distinct “enemy” when we’re anesthetized by consumption and diluted into an obsession with social appearance, drifting away from any shared social feeling we might recognize ourselves in.
Rotten Sound deal with exactly this. With fury and technique (a few more musical rough edges would have made them more human and more believable, but so be it), they worry about the risk of epistemological extinction, criticize cynicism and hyper-individualism, and try to shield us from the disappearance we are unconsciously risking as a species. They become bearers of our losses of truth and reality.
A gentle, worried record—like a grandmother who, from the height of her age, tries to protect her unaware grandchildren. An embrace, and at the same time a caress. Listening to this album, you feel oddly pampered and indulged.