Push My Buttons – PMB020
Punk has always claimed some ownership of the future, but Isotope Soap sounds suspicious that the future was delivered by the wrong courier. An Artifact of Insects compresses ten songs into less than fifteen minutes, constructing a world of malfunctioning communication, compulsory productivity, synthetic solutions, alien encounters and boredom upgraded with new hardware. The record moves at hardcore speed, but its nervous system is electronic. Synthesizers flash instructions that cannot be followed, guitars arrive as bent metallic interruptions, drums keep imposing order, and the voice changes shape as though several defective authorities are attempting to use the same public-address system. Nothing lasts long enough to become comfortable. Even the album’s longer ideas behave as though somebody is already reaching for the power switch.
Isotope Soap began as Peter Swedenhammar’s return to making music alone after decades inside Swedish punk and hardcore. His history included Raped Teenagers and the microscopic eruptions of Pusrad, whose songs often ended before another band would have completed its count-in. Acquiring synthesizers gave Swedenhammar the productive disorientation of becoming a beginner again. The project was initially called Clockout before taking its permanent name from a Geza X and the Mommymen song, although Swedenhammar identified Devo, Punishment of Luxury, Iko ’83, Das Ding, Five Times of Dust and the Screamers among the more direct initial inspirations. Those references explain the available machinery, but they do not explain what Isotope Soap does with it. This is not an expert restoration of late-1970s synth punk. It is older punk experience being made strange again by unfamiliar tools.
That combination is crucial. An Artifact of Insects has the efficiency of someone who spent years learning exactly how little time a song requires, yet its electronics keep opening trapdoors beneath that discipline. Synthesizers are sometimes treated as futuristic decoration, a layer sprayed over conventional rock to make it glow under ultraviolet light. Isotope Soap uses them more aggressively. They interrupt rhythm, bend the apparent age of the human voice and introduce systems whose rules remain unclear. The machine is not a backdrop. It is another argumentative band member, one capable of changing a sarcastic punk song into a transmission intercepted from a failed administrative satellite.
The titles arrive like fragments from warning labels, software menus and damaged psychiatric files: “T-t-t-telepathic,” “Easy Readable,” “Silicon Solution,” “Hey, Karoshi!,” “Abortion/Suicide,” “Fragile Dream,” “Itchy Rain,” “New World Boredom,” “Zanfretta” and “Kioma.” Read consecutively, they resemble the vocabulary of a civilization that can still manufacture concepts but has lost confidence in their meaning. “Easy Readable” is itself linguistically unstable, promising clarity through language that has already developed a fault. “Silicon Solution” sounds equally like an advertisement and a medical diagnosis. The stutter built into “T-t-t-telepathic” turns direct mind-to-mind communication into another signal that cannot establish a connection.
“Hey, Karoshi!” places the Japanese term for death through overwork inside the chirpy punctuation of a greeting. That collision contains much of Isotope Soap’s method. Catastrophe is presented in the language of customer service, while despair arrives with enough rhythmic force to become briefly exhilarating. “New World Boredom” performs a related mutation on the familiar promise of a brave new world. Technology may increase speed, access and stimulation, yet the result is not necessarily wonder. It may simply produce boredom with a brighter interface. The album was released in January 2020, just before screens became an even larger portion of ordinary social existence, but its anxiety does not depend upon accidental prophecy. The technological exhaustion it describes was already present. Later events merely enlarged the display.
Most of the songs vanish in one or two minutes. “Easy Readable” lasts forty-four seconds, “New World Boredom” forty-five, and “Abortion/Suicide” fifty. This brevity does not reduce them to sketches. It removes the expectation that a worthwhile musical thought must be expanded until it resembles a conventional product. Swedenhammar’s hardcore background remains audible in that refusal of padding. A riff, synthetic pulse, altered voice or verbal idea enters, demonstrates its peculiar law and disappears. The record behaves less like a collection of miniature songs than a box of captured electrical organisms, each given only enough air to expose its particular movement.
“Zanfretta,” the longest piece at slightly over three minutes, changes the scale of the album simply by remaining present. Its title points toward Pier Fortunato Zanfretta, the Italian security guard whose claims of repeated extraterrestrial encounters became one of Europe’s stranger UFO narratives. That reference belongs naturally inside Isotope Soap’s universe. The alien is not a majestic visitor carrying cosmic enlightenment. It is another destabilizing intelligence encountered while someone is working a night shift, an impossible event entering through the routine obligations of employment. After so many compressed pieces, three minutes begin to feel like lost time aboard a craft. The record stretches, examines its surroundings and then deposits the listener back into the final short transmission.
The phrase An Artifact of Insects proposes several possible makers. It could describe an object discovered after humanity has disappeared, misidentified by whatever intelligence begins cataloguing our residue. It could treat human beings themselves as insects, collectively constructing enormous systems that no individual fully comprehends. It might also describe the record’s sound: small components moving rapidly, communicating through vibration, assembling a structure through collective activity rather than central command. Punk groups are often described through individual personality, but this music repeatedly behaves like a colony. Rhythm, voice, guitar and electronics carry separate pieces of information whose larger pattern only becomes visible through accumulation.
The cover places that colony inside a room whose ceiling has been removed to expose outer space. Two kneeling or standing human figures have been given labyrinthine insect heads, their bodies cut from mismatched printed matter. Keyboard diagrams cross through the Isotope Soap name at right angles, suggesting both musical instruments and the control panels of an apparatus nobody was trained to operate. A tiny television displays an insect while a pale animal-shaped construction occupies the foreground, assembled from text rather than flesh. The domestic room, laboratory, rehearsal space and spacecraft have collapsed into one location. It is funny before it becomes disturbing, which is generally where Isotope Soap is most effective.
Swedenhammar’s partnership with Benjamin Vallé gave the project another important connection to Stockholm’s contemporary underground. Vallé was also a founding guitarist of Viagra Boys, but Isotope Soap offered a less publicly legible machine, one where punk, primitive electronics, science-fiction jokes and hardcore compression could be wired together without concern for a stable genre identity. Vallé’s death in 2021 inevitably gives these recordings additional historical gravity, but An Artifact of Insects should not be converted retrospectively into memorial music. It is alive with invention, speed and ridiculous ideas. Its value lies partly in hearing experienced musicians behave as though experience has not granted them permission to become predictable.
Push My Buttons issued the record as PMB020 in an edition of three hundred black-vinyl copies with an insert that doubled as a lyric sheet and poster, while some direct orders included a larger promotional poster. Calling this the group’s first full-length album is technically accurate and delightfully perverse. Many bands would use fifteen minutes to introduce the first side of an LP; Isotope Soap uses it to build a civilization, accelerate its technological development, exhaust its workers, establish telepathy, encounter extraterrestrials and leave behind an object for insects to interpret.
The band has described itself as having no aims but possessing a clear vision of the future. That paradox explains why this record avoids the dead surface of retro synth punk. It does not imitate an era when musicians imagined what future control systems might sound like. It listens to those systems after they have become ordinary, portable and boring. The future here is not chrome architecture or flying vehicles. It is constant communication producing less understanding, infinite information reduced to slogans, and human beings required to adapt themselves to tools supposedly designed for their convenience. Against that condition, Isotope Soap offers fifteen minutes of concentrated malfunction. The bugs have entered the system, learned to play instruments and left us an artifact before the exterminator arrives.
Isotope Soap began as Peter Swedenhammar’s return to making music alone after decades inside Swedish punk and hardcore. His history included Raped Teenagers and the microscopic eruptions of Pusrad, whose songs often ended before another band would have completed its count-in. Acquiring synthesizers gave Swedenhammar the productive disorientation of becoming a beginner again. The project was initially called Clockout before taking its permanent name from a Geza X and the Mommymen song, although Swedenhammar identified Devo, Punishment of Luxury, Iko ’83, Das Ding, Five Times of Dust and the Screamers among the more direct initial inspirations. Those references explain the available machinery, but they do not explain what Isotope Soap does with it. This is not an expert restoration of late-1970s synth punk. It is older punk experience being made strange again by unfamiliar tools.
That combination is crucial. An Artifact of Insects has the efficiency of someone who spent years learning exactly how little time a song requires, yet its electronics keep opening trapdoors beneath that discipline. Synthesizers are sometimes treated as futuristic decoration, a layer sprayed over conventional rock to make it glow under ultraviolet light. Isotope Soap uses them more aggressively. They interrupt rhythm, bend the apparent age of the human voice and introduce systems whose rules remain unclear. The machine is not a backdrop. It is another argumentative band member, one capable of changing a sarcastic punk song into a transmission intercepted from a failed administrative satellite.
The titles arrive like fragments from warning labels, software menus and damaged psychiatric files: “T-t-t-telepathic,” “Easy Readable,” “Silicon Solution,” “Hey, Karoshi!,” “Abortion/Suicide,” “Fragile Dream,” “Itchy Rain,” “New World Boredom,” “Zanfretta” and “Kioma.” Read consecutively, they resemble the vocabulary of a civilization that can still manufacture concepts but has lost confidence in their meaning. “Easy Readable” is itself linguistically unstable, promising clarity through language that has already developed a fault. “Silicon Solution” sounds equally like an advertisement and a medical diagnosis. The stutter built into “T-t-t-telepathic” turns direct mind-to-mind communication into another signal that cannot establish a connection.
“Hey, Karoshi!” places the Japanese term for death through overwork inside the chirpy punctuation of a greeting. That collision contains much of Isotope Soap’s method. Catastrophe is presented in the language of customer service, while despair arrives with enough rhythmic force to become briefly exhilarating. “New World Boredom” performs a related mutation on the familiar promise of a brave new world. Technology may increase speed, access and stimulation, yet the result is not necessarily wonder. It may simply produce boredom with a brighter interface. The album was released in January 2020, just before screens became an even larger portion of ordinary social existence, but its anxiety does not depend upon accidental prophecy. The technological exhaustion it describes was already present. Later events merely enlarged the display.
Most of the songs vanish in one or two minutes. “Easy Readable” lasts forty-four seconds, “New World Boredom” forty-five, and “Abortion/Suicide” fifty. This brevity does not reduce them to sketches. It removes the expectation that a worthwhile musical thought must be expanded until it resembles a conventional product. Swedenhammar’s hardcore background remains audible in that refusal of padding. A riff, synthetic pulse, altered voice or verbal idea enters, demonstrates its peculiar law and disappears. The record behaves less like a collection of miniature songs than a box of captured electrical organisms, each given only enough air to expose its particular movement.
“Zanfretta,” the longest piece at slightly over three minutes, changes the scale of the album simply by remaining present. Its title points toward Pier Fortunato Zanfretta, the Italian security guard whose claims of repeated extraterrestrial encounters became one of Europe’s stranger UFO narratives. That reference belongs naturally inside Isotope Soap’s universe. The alien is not a majestic visitor carrying cosmic enlightenment. It is another destabilizing intelligence encountered while someone is working a night shift, an impossible event entering through the routine obligations of employment. After so many compressed pieces, three minutes begin to feel like lost time aboard a craft. The record stretches, examines its surroundings and then deposits the listener back into the final short transmission.
The phrase An Artifact of Insects proposes several possible makers. It could describe an object discovered after humanity has disappeared, misidentified by whatever intelligence begins cataloguing our residue. It could treat human beings themselves as insects, collectively constructing enormous systems that no individual fully comprehends. It might also describe the record’s sound: small components moving rapidly, communicating through vibration, assembling a structure through collective activity rather than central command. Punk groups are often described through individual personality, but this music repeatedly behaves like a colony. Rhythm, voice, guitar and electronics carry separate pieces of information whose larger pattern only becomes visible through accumulation.
The cover places that colony inside a room whose ceiling has been removed to expose outer space. Two kneeling or standing human figures have been given labyrinthine insect heads, their bodies cut from mismatched printed matter. Keyboard diagrams cross through the Isotope Soap name at right angles, suggesting both musical instruments and the control panels of an apparatus nobody was trained to operate. A tiny television displays an insect while a pale animal-shaped construction occupies the foreground, assembled from text rather than flesh. The domestic room, laboratory, rehearsal space and spacecraft have collapsed into one location. It is funny before it becomes disturbing, which is generally where Isotope Soap is most effective.
Swedenhammar’s partnership with Benjamin Vallé gave the project another important connection to Stockholm’s contemporary underground. Vallé was also a founding guitarist of Viagra Boys, but Isotope Soap offered a less publicly legible machine, one where punk, primitive electronics, science-fiction jokes and hardcore compression could be wired together without concern for a stable genre identity. Vallé’s death in 2021 inevitably gives these recordings additional historical gravity, but An Artifact of Insects should not be converted retrospectively into memorial music. It is alive with invention, speed and ridiculous ideas. Its value lies partly in hearing experienced musicians behave as though experience has not granted them permission to become predictable.
Push My Buttons issued the record as PMB020 in an edition of three hundred black-vinyl copies with an insert that doubled as a lyric sheet and poster, while some direct orders included a larger promotional poster. Calling this the group’s first full-length album is technically accurate and delightfully perverse. Many bands would use fifteen minutes to introduce the first side of an LP; Isotope Soap uses it to build a civilization, accelerate its technological development, exhaust its workers, establish telepathy, encounter extraterrestrials and leave behind an object for insects to interpret.
The band has described itself as having no aims but possessing a clear vision of the future. That paradox explains why this record avoids the dead surface of retro synth punk. It does not imitate an era when musicians imagined what future control systems might sound like. It listens to those systems after they have become ordinary, portable and boring. The future here is not chrome architecture or flying vehicles. It is constant communication producing less understanding, infinite information reduced to slogans, and human beings required to adapt themselves to tools supposedly designed for their convenience. Against that condition, Isotope Soap offers fifteen minutes of concentrated malfunction. The bugs have entered the system, learned to play instruments and left us an artifact before the exterminator arrives.
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