I've tried to not see myself in the scratchy black absence occupying the center of Hand Model's Will Life Reign Supreme Even In Death cover art. I've tried but I've failed. In general, I don't have a depressive outlook on life, but I have to admit that sometimes the general ebb and flow can leave me with the impression that I'm a passive observer in my own existence. Like a pebble imbued in the sandy bottom of a river, the days trickle past like a wild, clear shadow. Yet, there I lay. Unmoved, unscathed, and uninvolved. I get the sense that the artist behind this record feels somewhat the same. At the center of Hand Model we find Ignat Frege, one half of the duo Wreck and Reference, and on the whole, a master at replicating the tortured patterns of a certain cursed and destitute variety of ennui. While bright infusions of synth tickle and taunt the senses, and babbling undulations of bass crush and cudgel the mind, Ignat's voice and verse remain flat, detached and distant- a residue in the shape of a man, stained on the fabric of reflection as a regression into regret. Amongst the lush, cold atmosphere of Will Life Reign Supreme Even In Death, Ignat embodies an impoverished state of affairs- wrapped by comforts he feels constricted, sorting through small luxuries they turn to brittle clay shards in his hands, present at a grand banquet he drags his belly across the floor half-starved. His tongue like sandpaper, his fingers wrapped in 4 layers of latex, his eyes plucked out for his own piece of mind. In this assortment of abstract prose and a bleeding spray of nausea-inducing electronics, we find a modern subject who haunts his own home and is a stranger to his own will, to the ability to grasp satisfaction. A futile monument to a Faustian delima- an exchange where absolute opulence is offered at the price of a purgatory of passive indignation. Dying to die for something. The exit is itself a harsh sanction. A Sisyphean exercise in un-undertaking. A long march to push a bolder out from the entrance of one's cradle-tomb. A deliberate claiming of a life that is more than a prolonged phase of paralysis. If only to prove that there is some agency still manifest in the human soul.
