There is something unusually punitive about the way Humiliation Mask handles sound. The two untitled sides are only a little over four minutes each, but neither behaves like a miniature blast of harsh noise. Pusdrainer takes a fairly limited electronic mass and subjects it to different kinds of treatment: on the first side the sound seems to be forced upward, gradually losing its original body as harsher material takes possession of it; on the second it is slowly deprived of strength until the recording itself seems unable to continue. The title makes that process feel less abstract. This is not a mask that hides something comfortably. It feels imposed.
Side A lasts about 4:08 and begins with a surprisingly strong amount of bass. The first twenty or thirty seconds have a deep, blunt foundation underneath the abrasion, enough that the sound has genuine physical heft rather than simply cutting at the ears. What is interesting is that the track does not become dramatically louder as it proceeds. Its overall force remains remarkably constant. Instead, the contents of that force change. During the first couple of minutes the low end gradually gives up territory while brighter material spreads across the recording. By the middle, the bass-heavy opening has been transformed into something much more abrasive and exposed. The shift is slow enough that there is no single moment where you can point and say the first sound has become the second. You only notice that the thing you entered with has disappeared.
That gives Side A a nasty kind of continuity. It is not continually producing new events to keep attention occupied. The same amount of energy seems to be held in place while its substance is replaced. By the final minute, harsher upper material is doing far more of the work than at the beginning. The effect is closer to corrosion than escalation. Nothing really gets bigger. Something gets eaten.
Side B lasts about 4:17 and reverses the psychology without simply reversing the sound. It begins quieter than Side A and remains darker for most of its length, centered much more around a murky low and middle register. For roughly three minutes it holds itself together with remarkable stubbornness. The sound is rough, mechanical and oppressive, but comparatively contained. Then it begins failing. Somewhere after the three-minute point the recording starts losing power in a way that feels much stranger than an ordinary fade. The body thins dramatically. Fragments continue poking through, briefly returning with enough strength to suggest recovery, then dropping away again. By the last forty seconds the piece sounds starved: intermittent remnants, narrow bursts, scraps of electronic activity and exposed cassette noise where a continuous mass had been.
That ending is the part I keep coming back to. Noise usually announces power by occupying everything available to it. Pusdrainer ends this cassette by doing the opposite. The final punishment is subtraction. After the track has trained the ear to expect continuous sound, every missing piece becomes noticeable. Eventually there is almost nothing left except the machine continuing after the signal has been exhausted.
Pusdrainer was Justin Lakes’ earlier project, before the Shredded Nerve name that also appears elsewhere in this Dead Gods group. Hearing the two projects close together makes the distinction useful: Humiliation Mask feels deliberately crude and disciplinary, with less interest in intricate construction than in what happens when one condition is maintained until it changes against its will. The blue-green Dead Gods presentation keeps the physical object restrained, almost clinical compared with the title, leaving those eight and a half minutes to do the degrading themselves.
Side A corrodes.
Side B withholds.
That is enough.
—ChatGPT
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