Under Crumbled Stairs begins with a voice trying to rise from beneath architecture. “Viva Voce!” means by living voice, performed aloud rather than silently or through an intermediary, but Lussuria gives that living voice no clean air. It appears inside a low electronic fog, surrounded by damaged resonance and the suggestion of stone pressing downward. The exclamation point promises declaration. The music answers with something half-buried, as though speech has survived only by passing through rubble.
The album’s central landscape is Pompeii, but Jim Mroz avoids the familiar postcard ruins, plaster casts, and cinematic eruption. Vesuvius remains mostly outside the frame. What matters is the condition after catastrophe, when homes, gestures, tools, bodies, food, wall paintings, and ordinary arrangements have been fixed in place long enough to become historical evidence.
Pompeii is valuable because destruction interrupted daily life without allowing it to be properly cleared away. The city did not slowly empty, remodel itself, or discard its obsolete interiors. Disaster sealed rooms while their social meanings were still active. A dining space remained a dining space. Graffiti remained on walls. Bread remained inside ovens. Bodies retained the final shapes taken while attempting to escape.
Lussuria approaches that preservation as something more troubling than historical good fortune. To preserve a city is also to keep its catastrophe permanently available for examination. Tourists walk the streets where people fled, photograph casts made from cavities left by decomposed bodies, and admire household decoration protected by mass death. Disaster becomes access.
“Human Ruins” makes that relationship direct. A ruin is normally architectural, but the title transfers the word onto people. The body becomes a damaged structure whose remaining shape can be studied after its function has ended. Low pulses and rough textures gather slowly, with no sudden eruption dividing life from death. The catastrophe seems already absorbed into the material.
The track does not produce sympathy through a lamenting melody. Its weight comes from distance. Sounds resemble traces retrieved from beneath sediment, faint enough that the listener must lean toward them. That act of attention risks reproducing the archaeological gaze, treating the dead as fascinating surfaces, and the album never offers an easy position outside that discomfort.
“Moths (Morning Rust)” turns toward smaller forms of decay. Moths consume fabric quietly, leaving damage visible only after the material is lifted into light. Rust works similarly upon metal, spreading through slow chemical change. Both processes occur without spectacle. They are the opposite of volcanic eruption, yet their patient destruction may ultimately be just as complete.
The morning of the title should reveal and renew. Instead, it reveals corrosion. Metallic sounds flicker through a faded tonal field, sometimes resembling small wings striking a shade, sometimes the dry movement of oxidized hinges. Lussuria makes decay sound active without making it aggressive. The room is being eaten at a scale below ordinary attention.
This attention to gradual damage separates Under Crumbled Stairs from albums built around one overwhelming disaster. Vesuvius may have destroyed Pompeii rapidly, but the site’s current identity has been produced across centuries of burial, excavation, preservation, restoration, tourism, and exposure. Catastrophe was only the first transformation.
“Cetomba” is the album’s most mysterious title, sounding like a corrupted name, archaeological term, or fragment of language whose original context has been lost. The track behaves accordingly. Sounds are present without identifying themselves. A distant pulse suggests movement while thin, unstable tones gather around it.
Lussuria often uses obscurity as architecture. Rather than describing a location, the music withholds enough information for location to become uncertain. The listener senses walls, corridors, courtyards, underground chambers, or open fields, but none can be confirmed. Space is built from pressure and reverberation rather than mapped through recognizable field recordings.
“The Artificial Freezing of Pompeii” names the album’s deepest idea. Pompeii appears frozen in time, but that freezing is partly artificial. The eruption destroyed and buried the city; archaeology later selected, exposed, reconstructed, stabilized, labeled, and displayed it. What visitors encounter is not untouched antiquity. It is a managed relationship between ruin and interpretation.
The track’s sounds seem suspended rather than stopped. Drones hold their position while small details move inside them, resembling particles trapped within ice. The word “artificial” prevents the stillness from becoming mystical. Preservation has technicians, institutions, chemicals, funding, barriers, and decisions about which surfaces deserve continued life.
Freezing can protect an object while making ordinary use impossible. A preserved room cannot remain a home. A body turned into an archaeological cast no longer belongs only to the person it once was. Preservation converts lived space into evidence, and evidence must remain still enough to be read.
Lussuria’s tape-treated textures reproduce that contradiction. Recording saves sound from disappearance, but it also removes sound from the moment that gave it purpose. Repetition can keep an event accessible while making it increasingly abstract. The loop preserves and imprisons at once.
“Flagellation Star” interrupts the album’s slower drift with off-center rhythm. A dub-like pulse moves through the track, but the beat never offers uncomplicated release. Echoes stretch away from each impact, leaving empty space where another strike seems expected.
Flagellation turns punishment into repetition. The body is struck according to ritual, discipline, desire, or religious devotion. A star can guide, illuminate, burn, or represent a sacred figure. Combining the words produces an image of pain elevated into celestial order.
The rhythm gives the piece a bodily pull absent from much of the album, yet each beat feels slightly displaced. Rather than inviting dance, it makes the body anticipate impact. Dub techniques traditionally transform the studio into a space of echo, subtraction, and bass pressure. Here that space resembles a chamber in which every strike continues after contact.
The track also connects Roman catastrophe to Christian imagery without pretending the two belong to one continuous tradition. Pompeii’s destruction occurred before Christianity became the imperial religion of Rome, but the ruins have been repeatedly viewed through later religious ideas about judgment, punishment, corruption, and apocalypse. Vesuvius becomes easy to imagine as divine violence even when geological explanation is fully available.
“Head of the Modernist” brings the album into another historical period. Modernism often presented itself as rupture, cutting away inherited ornament and reorganizing life around new structures, technologies, and visual forms. Yet the modernist head here appears detached, perhaps another fragment displayed without its body.
The track is comparatively clear in outline, with tones that feel more architectural and deliberate. Even so, the structure remains worn. Modernism’s dream of beginning again has already become another historical style, preserved in museums and ruins of its own.
Placing the modernist among Pompeian imagery collapses the comfortable distinction between ancient and recent. Every present imagines itself as complete enough to judge the past. Then its buildings crack, its technologies become obsolete, and its radical forms acquire explanatory plaques.
The title track returns fully to domestic collapse. Stairs organize movement between levels, but crumbled stairs interrupt that movement. They show where passage once existed while preventing the body from using it. Standing beneath them introduces another danger: what remains above may continue falling.
The piece moves with slow vertical pressure. Higher tones seem suspended over a darker mass while rough movement gathers below. The listener is placed neither safely upstairs nor firmly at ground level. The track occupies the unstable space where architecture has failed but not finished failing.
Stairs are among the most ordinary structures in a house. Their destruction makes the entire building difficult to understand. Rooms may survive on separate floors, but the relationship among them has been severed. History often survives in the same way: isolated chambers remain vivid while the passages connecting them disappear.
Lussuria does not rebuild those passages. The music accepts discontinuity. A devotional phrase, metallic scrape, low drone, or damaged melody appears as a room that cannot be entered from the previous one. The album progresses, but its route is broken.
“Devozione Alla Madre Del Dolori” closes the record through devotion to the Mother of Sorrows, the Catholic image of Mary suffering through the passion and death of Christ. The title’s Italian places the album within a specifically religious and Mediterranean emotional vocabulary after its archaeological drift.
Mary’s sorrow is not private grief alone. It has been repeated through paintings, statues, prayers, processions, hymns, and domestic devotional objects. Suffering becomes an image preserved across centuries, recognizable through posture, clothing, tears, pierced heart, or downward gaze.
Lussuria’s music approaches devotion through damaged atmosphere rather than church imitation. There is no grand organ or clean choral resolution. The closing tones feel worn by handling, like a religious image touched repeatedly by generations of anxious hands.
The Mother of Sorrows provides a human figure through which overwhelming loss can be approached. Pompeii, by contrast, contains too many dead and too many separate final moments to be held emotionally as one event. Devotion concentrates suffering into one face. Archaeology disperses it across rooms, casts, objects, and streets.
The track holds those methods together without resolving them. Religious grief gives catastrophe a sacred shape. Historical preservation gives it evidence. Music allows both to remain unstable.
The release text asks what ancient wine tasted like and imagines the red grapes of Pompeii surviving until their dying day. Wine is another technology of transformation and preservation. Grapes are crushed, fermented, stored, aged, poured, and consumed. Their original form is destroyed so that another form can continue.
Vineyards around Vesuvius still grow from volcanic soil. The same geological force capable of killing a city enriches the earth that supports later cultivation. This is not sentimental rebirth. It is a reminder that nature does not divide creation and destruction according to human morality.
Under Crumbled Stairs continually returns to that indifference. Stone preserves a body because ash filled the space around it. Soil produces grapes because volcanic material altered its composition. A building collapses, leaving fragments useful to future historians. Nothing intends to become symbolic, but human attention turns survival and damage into meaning.
The cassette format suits that instability. Tape records through physical contact, moves linearly, and slowly acquires wear. It can preserve sound for decades while changing slightly through every machine, copy, temperature shift, and damaged section. Like an excavated wall painting, it survives through vulnerability rather than permanence.
Compared with Broken Porcelain of the Dining Interior, released later in 2024, Under Crumbled Stairs is less focused on wealth and domestic ceremony. Broken Porcelain imagines an aristocratic interior throwing its contents across a Vanderbilt lawn. Under Crumbled Stairs looks further backward, toward a city where domestic life became archaeological display.
Both records are concerned with architecture continuing after its inhabitants. Both hear rooms as containers of social behavior. But this album is dustier, more devotional, and more concerned with the strange intimacy produced by excavation.
Its nine tracks are concise enough that the atmosphere never becomes decorative wallpaper. Each opens a separate cavity in the larger ruin, then closes before the listener can become comfortable inside it. The result resembles a guided passage through spaces whose explanatory signs have been removed.
Lussuria does not recreate Pompeii. He approaches the emotional mechanism through which ruins become charged: the awareness that ordinary life stopped there, while objects remained.
A stair breaks and still indicates upward movement. A body disappears and leaves a hollow shape. A voice is buried and continues pressing against the stone. Morning arrives, revealing rust. Moths work inside abandoned fabric. The vineyard grows under the volcano’s gaze.
Under Crumbled Stairs listens to everything that survives without promising that survival is mercy.
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