A Closer Listen
Simi Fyda‘s In My Personal Heaven, I’m the Devil’s Spawn offers no gentle introduction. Compared to Yuri (2023), it works within a noticeably narrower palette. The bright contrasts of its predecessor have given way to a largely monochrome world, built from minute variations of timbre, pressure and pitch. Many of the preoccupations of Yuri remain, but they are pursued with greater concentration. The music repeatedly folds back on itself, testing how much tension can be extracted from the smallest amount of material.
The opening track, “-may-care”, signals a state of abrasion, establishing an atmosphere of metallic coldness that hangs over the entire record. “maso chords” introduces a faint current of nostalgia, its harmonies carrying the suggestion of something remembered yet irretrievable. From there, the material grows steadily more compressed. “idle hands” simmers without release, while “hedo chords” circles obsessively around recurring intervals and frozen harmonic figures. By the time “mono chords” arrives, repetition itself has become the subject. Minute tonal inflections slowly reshape the surface until the music seems to trap itself inside its own logic, producing a sense of claustrophobia without ever resorting to excess.
Originally conceived as an octophonic installation before being reimagined for stereo, the music acquires an unusually enclosed character. Sounds seem unable to disperse, and repeated gestures linger, each return carrying greater psychological weight. Even the faint vocal traces remain caught within the surrounding texture, surfacing only briefly before dissolving back into the dense harmonic field.
The closing “take the hindmost” provides the only substantial shift in perspective. Layers of electronic residue and circuitry redirect attention towards texture itself, as if searching for a new vocabulary from within the material already at hand. Nothing resolves. Instead, the album erases its own traces, leaving behind only the memory of sounds unwilling to disappear.
The allow us to delve deeper into her personal heaven, Simi Fyda has kindly agreed to answer four questions by email.
The album emerged from what you describe as “a version that almost existed” — music composed during a period of isolation and then reshaped into its final form. Could you talk about what was lost, what was retained, and whether you think traces of that unrealised version still haunt the record we hear today?
I started the octophonic pieces during a period where I genuinely couldn’t make anything. I had no access to whatever I normally rely on. So I thought okay, let’s see if I still can do this. It was less of a decision and more just something to do, or to maintain.
When I came back to it I was still kinda fed up with the whole thing, which actually helped. I stopped being careful with it and a lot got cut. But the atmosphere stayed, which annoyed me at first because I half wanted a clean break from it. I think that the earlier version is still in there somewhere, not as a foundation, probably more like the thing the record keeps almost touching without quite getting there.
You have said that composing this music felt like becoming a demon — specifically one of the figures your grandmother claimed to have encountered in the very space where the album was eventually completed. How did that family story enter the work, and what does the title In My Personal Heaven, I’m the Devil’s Spawn reveal about the relationship between ancestry, memory, and self-transformation in your practice?
I moved back into my grandmother’s apartment last November for a couple months and basically just disappeared into it. I wasn’t planning to make a record about any of that. I thought I was making something from a place rather than about it.
She had paranoid schizophrenia, periods of seeing figures, demons, specific presences in specific corners of that apartment. I grew up hearing all of it, kind of terrified and fascinated at the same time. I lived there alone as a teenager too. So by the time I came back last november, it was already carrying a lot, I just wasn’t thinking about it consciously.
She died in March, right after the album was finished. The timing still felt… I don’t even have a word to use here to be honest. The album isn’t about her, at least that wasn’t the intention. But she’s in there.
Much of the album feels remarkably restrained. Tracks seem to hover on the verge of unleashing a full sonic assault, yet repeatedly pull back into themselves. Even the buried vocal traces feel half-suppressed, as though emerging from behind a wall. Was this tension between eruption and containment a conscious compositional strategy, or did it arise naturally from the material?
Mostly conscious. I over-anticipate everything. I’ll have already resolved something in my head before it’s even happened, which just kills it. So a lot of this was genuinely trying not to do that.
Whenever something felt like it was building toward release I’d just hold it there a bit longer than felt comfortable. I kept reminding myself that circling around something can be enough, that I don’t always have to arrive, don’t have to control every outcome in the ways I’ve conditioned myself to.
The record is built around recurrence rather than development, with sounds, intervals, pipe tones and microtonal clusters reappearing in altered forms throughout the album. Given your background in installation and spatial sound, how did the process of collapsing an octophonic work into stereo affect your thinking about repetition, space and listening? Did reducing the physical dimensions of the piece paradoxically make it feel more intimate, claustrophobic, or psychologically charged?
The recurrence came from spending a long time with a very small pool of material. At some point development just stopped making sense as a framework. Returning somehow did.
In the octophonic versions sound could leave, it had a room to dissolve into. In stereo it couldn’t, so everything that was previously escapable became structural. The noise, the density, all of it just stayed there and then I brought it all even closer and it changed what the material actually was. I think space didn’t disappear, it just stopped being outside the work.
Tue Aug 04 00:01:28 GMT 2026