Androctonyx - AXISTE PAS

A Closer Listen

AXISTE PAS feels like the shadow cast by Androctonyx’s debut, Respawning as a Pearl. If that earlier record was concerned with transformation and ecstatic becoming, this new album turns toward absence and the desire to drift beyond reach. Released on Slikback’s Xternal Domain imprint, it occupies a space where industrial abrasion, spectral ambience and fragmented memory coexist in uneasy balance.

The album’s most striking quality is its luminosity. Even at its darkest, AXISTE PAS glows from within. “johatsu”— named after the Japanese phenomenon of voluntary disappearance — shimmers with an almost ecstatic intensity, while “Thorn” introduces an ecclesiastical dimension through the resonance of an organ that slowly expands into a vast drone before collapsing into something resembling the fading tail of an air-raid siren. Sacred music and catastrophe momentarily occupy the same frequency.

Throughout the record, Androctonyx continues his practice of reshaping found materials into unstable new forms. Samples are stretched, crushed and warped until their origins become indistinct. Influences as disparate as Giacinto Scelsi, Hildegard von Bingen, video game soundtracks and electroacoustic music are melted down into a single, coherent atmosphere. Just like his debut, Androctonyx latest work thrives on accidents and transformations, where glitches and distortions become compositional tools rather than errors.

The conceptual centrepiece is “EDEN HAS A BARBED WIRE FENCE AROUND IT.” As Androctonyx reveals in the following interview, the title was borrowed from a book on Coil, whose work frequently explored esoteric spirituality and the pursuit of altered states. In the Coil universe, paradise is rarely a place of innocence; it is often bound up with desire and taboo. The barbed wire fence therefore becomes not only a political image but also an occult one: the boundary that separates ordinary consciousness from transformative experience. Read instead through Giorgio Agamben’s notion that Western culture is defined not by paradise itself but by its loss, the phrase becomes a bleak contemporary update of Eden: paradise remains visible, but inaccessible, enclosed not by angels but by modern systems of exclusion. The image captures much of the album’s emotional terrain — longing without arrival, proximity without access.

The closing track, “The Beast, The Departure, The Unwanted, The Wish”, brings the album to a fitting conclusion. Industrial percussion and distortion gradually take hold, replacing the earlier shimmer with something heavier and more terminal. Yet AXISTE PAS never descends into pure nihilism. Like its predecessor, it remains suspended between opposing forces: disappearance and persistence, despair and transcendence, silence and emergence. If Respawning as a Pearl was a statement of becoming, AXISTE PAS is a meditation on what remains when the desire is no longer to appear, but to vanish.

Thanks to an email exchange, Androctonyx shed further insight into his production process.

Your debut album Respawning as a Pearl felt like a work of emergence and transformation, drawing on Gnostic imagery, glitches, and ecstatic blooming. AXISTE PAS seems darker and more elusive, centred on absence, unattainable desires, and self-chosen disappearance. Do you see the two albums as connected chapters of the same journey, and what changed for you between them?

That’s exactly it. They are two pieces that are polarized. Respawning as a Pearl is my first album. I wanted it to be a statement of intent, an emergence. It’s my way out of silence. Something that becomes triumphant simply by existing. Gnostic imagery has interested me for a long time, and I find it to be very present in the reality we live in. There’s also inspiration from the manga BLAME! by Tsutomu Nihei, particularly its very last page. I see it as a kind of graphic illustration of this idea. In any case, there is absolutely a connection between these two albums.

The titles convey the overall idea. Respawning as a Pearl is (re)birth. AXISTE PAS is the desire for disappearance, within a prison of black iron. That said, I don’t see them as two successive chapters. Rather, they are two simultaneous chapters. One exists in the shadow of the other. Nothing has changed between these two moments; they are two forces that coexist.

And they will be synthesized, into the REALM. That’s the title of my next album, which will be released this summer on formforum, the label of Parker Black from Prison Religion.

The title AXISTE PAS comes from a half-remembered poem, while tracks such as “johatsu” and “EDEN HAS A BARBED WIRE FENCE AROUND IT” revolve around ideas of disappearance, exile, and inaccessible places. What drew you to these themes, and were there specific literary, philosophical, or personal references that shaped the album’s conceptual framework?

These are themes that have been with me for a long time. I think it’s also something fairly universal: sometimes being driven by a sense of triumph, and at other times wanting to drift very far away.

Unlike Respawning as a Pearl, which has a unity of time and place, AXISTE PAS is much more fragmented in form, with somewhat shorter tracks.

I did want to make something more vaporous in a sense, more ethereal. That said, this opposition was mostly constructed in hindsight; it wasn’t something I had intellectualized from the outset.

As for the references and imagery that accompanied me, they are more diverse.

The title “EDEN HAS A BARBED WIRE FENCE AROUND IT” comes from a book about Coil, written by Nick Soulsby, called Everything Keeps Dissolving.

“THORN” comes from an interview with Arvo Pärt in which he describes music as “a source of tears of joy, but also as a painful thorn.”

And even more concretely, “annonciade” is the name of a street where I used to live, in a town in the south of France.

So there aren’t really any specific themes, but rather memories of sounds, places, and atmospheres that evoke the dual feeling I mentioned earlier.

The record brings together an unusual constellation of influences—Giacinto Scelsi, Hildegard von Bingen, field recordings, electroacoustic textures, and even fragments of Bloodborne. How do these seemingly distant worlds interact within your compositional process, and what role do they play in constructing the atmosphere of AXISTE PAS?

I think there’s only a distance in appearance. If you change the scope, they’re actually very close. Between the violins in Scelsi’s Anahit and the Cleric Beast theme from Bloodborne, there are a lot of things in common. In any case, these atmospheres play a major role in my creative process. I use a lot of samples to make music (mostly samples, in fact) which I try to warp, crush, and push to their limits.

The idea is to melt all of that down and reshape it into something somewhat new.

The possibility of creating this kind of fusion between worlds that seem unrelated at first glance is something I learned from listening to the music of S280F, especially the album 28. It’s one of my major influences.

And my tendency to seek out extremely dissonant sounds developed through listening to Aho Ssan, who is also someone whose music I greatly admire.

Both Respawning as a Pearl and AXISTE PAS seem fascinated by transformation through sound: glitches becoming music, fragments becoming landscapes, disappearance becoming presence. How much of your work is guided by deliberate composition, and how much emerges from accidents, software failures, and the unpredictable behaviour of your tools?

It’s at the very core of what I do. And it stems from a dual reality: a choice and a necessity.

A choice, because it’s what I love : those moments when I manage to arrive at a sound that feels unexpected, slightly divergent.

A necessity, because I have absolutely no formal musical education, and to be honest, it doesn’t really interest me. What I enjoy is dropping a sample into a Granulator and running it through a badly configured Auto-Tune. Sometimes the magic happens. When it does, I try to give it some kind of shape. A bit like sculpture.

AXISTE PAS was released through Slikback’s label xternal domain and mastered by him. How did your connection with Slikback begin, and what kind of input did he have on the album’s final form?

I’m truly delighted about it. The connection happened quite naturally. I’ve been a big fan of his work for a long time. His album T A P E S T R Y  is a landmark album for me.

One day I saw that he had launched his own label, and I listened to one of its releases: Smelting by Worse, which is honestly excellent. So I sent him some demos, and he told me he was enthusiastic about them. The whole thing came together very smoothly. In terms of input, he brought his overall creative perspective, but never in a restrictive way. He also initiated contact with the graphic and visual artists.

More importantly, he brought a heart of gold. I’ll be eternally grateful for that.

(Gianmarco Del Re)